Most organizations funded in this strategic area exist to serve marginalized communities and to actively work against their discrimination. Many work to seek justice and protection for indigenous communities that are vulnerable to the exploitation of extractive industries and other land and environmental abuses. The organizations use methods such as documenting human rights violations, promoting the visibility and empowerment of discriminated groups, preserving memories so future generations will not forget and repeat the violations, and providing free legal assistance to ensure equal access to justice.
Read our 2018 Annual Report.
The majority of the organizations are form Mexico and Colombia, thus there is a focus on land, natural resources, enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings and peacebuilding. Projects within this strategic line were also supported in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Pakistan.
Overarching results
Grantees that have been supported from 2016–2018 report that, to some or a large extent, they have achieved:
- Access to justice 90 %
- Changes in national policy/ies 76 %
- Changes in national law/s 71 %
- Ceased impunity (to some extent) 60 %
Survey from the external evaluation of the supported organizations between 2016 and October 2018.
Disappearances of women and girls in Mexico
I(dh)eas Strategic Human Rights Litigation (I(dh)eas) has succeeded in putting disappearances of women and girls in the state of Mexico on the national and international agenda.
«Although the crisis of the disappearance of people living in Mexico was known, no civil society organization, much less the authorities, had done any work to document from the local level the impact of this problem on women and girls.» (I(dh)eas)
I(dh)eas is a pioneer in Mexico in the use of litigation to defend cases of disappearances before the United Nations system. This has been instrumental for putting political pressure on the federal and local authorities, for documentation, for making the obstacles that obstruct access to justice visible, and for advancing implementation, says Jérémy Renaux, deputy director in I(dh)eas.
Through working with five victims’ collectives and using methods such as documentation, legal aid, awareness raising and advocacy, I(dh)eas has supported the search and investigation of the 2 363 women and girls that are missing in the state of Mexico.
In July 2018, the National Commission for the Prevention and Eradication of Violence against Women (CONAVIM) admitted the request for a Declaration of Alert for Gender Violence (AVGM) for the disappearance of women, adolescents and girls in the state of Mexico. The implementation of urgent measures to prevent, investigate, punish and combat the disappearance of women in this entity will be a process that I(dh)eas will continue to monitor and promote in collaboration with the victims’ collectives in the state of Mexico.
Global movement against disappearances
The NHRF supports victims’ groups of disappearances not only in Mexico, but in Colombia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia as well. In June 2018, Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearance (AFAD) marked their 20th anniversary with the slogan «Decade three: Fight to be free». Through the support of NHRF, I(dh)eas, MOVICE Antioquia in Colombia and SKP-HAM in Indonesia participated at the conference. «This conference has given me more confidence as I observed that there is a strong global movement of civil society organizations against enforced disappearances. It has been really useful to learn from other HRD’s about the context in their respective countries, the similarities and the differences with the Mexican situation, as well as the Asian civil society’s strategies to combat this scourge and the challenges they face,» says Jérémy Renaux, who attended the conference.
