The Human Rights Defender Exchange (HRDx): Recognising Human Rights Defenders

Human rights have become the common language of humanity. Although daily headlines suggest that human rights are often more aspirational than realised, the human rights project is a defining feature of contemporary legal and political discussions. Within the human rights project, increasing attention is being paid to the role of people acting individually and together to realise human rights, that is, human rights defenders (HRDs). The international community recognised the centrality of HRDs to the human rights project with the unanimously adopted United Nations Declaration on HRDs (UN, 1998). Over three decades, institutions, organisations, and individuals have developed a growing body of laws, policies, and programmes to recognise, support, and protect HRDs. The recognition of HRDs has been described by the United Nations as a ‘paradigm shift’ (UN, 2018) away from State-centric approaches to human rights to focus on the agency of individuals and groups in defending rights where there are. This decentralised, local, more process-oriented understanding of the defense of human rights presents an opportunity for a different approach to the human rights project, both as a field of study and of practice. The project will develop a Human Rights Defender Exchange (HRDx): a hybrid platform and means of collaboration that will unify, inform, support, and expand the communities of scholarship and practice in the nascent field of ‘human rights defender studies’ (HRD Studies). The HRDx will also provide a repository for emerging literature and a forum to support a growing community of researchers, including through research training, workshops, publications, and events. Specifically, the HRDx will develop a foundation for HRD Studies by mapping, evaluating and making visible existing literature, research experiences, and data repositories. The HRDx will strengthen a community of researchers within and outside of academia by networking them with each other, developing pathways for publication and research dissemination, providing specialised research skills training and a fora for discussing ethical dilemmas, as well as one-to-one mentoring for ECRs and HRD researchers. The HRDx will also convene three exploratory collaborative research clusters: memory and the historical imagination; legality and legitimacy; and decoloniality and resistance. The HRDx will initiate a research-driven, collaborative, and equitable discussion of key debates and act as a catalyst for more ambitious collaborations. The activities of the HRDx will provide support to the growing number of actors working with HRDs and to a globally networked community of HRDs. A decolonial, participatory, and equitable approach to knowledge production will be embedded in the structure, activities, and working methods of the HRDx. Beyond responding to the immediate shift to activism and activists within the human rights project, HRD Studies has the potential to provide a bold and ambitious response to some of the persistent critiques of the human rights movement, putting the experiences, challenges and dilemmas faced by HRDs at the centre of exploration.