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...