By James Ron and Archana Pandya
Open Democracy - 13 November 2013
How important is
international funding to local human rights groups worldwide? Oddly enough, there
has been little published research on the topic. Pressured by angry nationalists
and vengeful governments, human rights activists and donors prefer to keep money
questions out of the spotlight.
Indeed, we know
of only two existing studies. In 2006, a Nigerian scholar published research on 20
of his country’s 100 human rights groups, the vast majority of which were foreign-supported. Two
years later, Israeli researchers published a study
based on interviews with 16 of the country’s 26 human rights groups, and said that more than 90 percent of their
budgets came from Europe and the United States. Neither study, however, shed
light on conditions elsewhere in the world.
To rectify this gap, we began by interviewing 128 human
rights workers from 60 countries in the Global South and former Communist region.
Then we assembled lists of all the local rights groups we could find in Rabat
and Casablanca (Morocco), Mumbai (India), and Mexico City and San Cristóbal de
las Casas (Mexico). Our team identified 189 groups in total, all of which were non-governmental,
domestically headquartered, politically unaffiliated, and legally registered.
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