'Too many lawyers': the problem with Europe's human rights NGOs

Human rights NGOs in Europe are not doing well. Funding cuts, legal restrictions, administrative burdens and smear campaigns are taking their toll. I see organisations drastically downsizing or closing altogether and staff burning out. If we are to reverse our fortunes, the traditionally legally-focused movement needs to rebalance its skill-set to include more communicators and organisers. Traditionally, human rights NGOs have been staffed mainly by lawyers. This is understandable. Human rights are legal standards contained in national, European and international law. If your main tools for getting human rights implemented are advocacy and litigation, then you need legal experts. But advocacy is becoming less effective because decision makers increasingly see supporting human rights as politically risky. And litigation as a tool is partly limited by increasing political interference with the courts in some countries, or because – again – politicians see potential political brownie points in not complying with (or see potential political costs in complying with) judgments that enforce human rights standards. It’s not just that NGOs’ traditional tools are losing their power. It’s that legal training does not equip us with the tools do we need to reverse our fortunes. Our main lever for restoring human rights and the organisations that promote them is public opinion. For as long as we live continue to live in democracies, pressure from voters can have an impact on decision makers. Which means we need communicators who can help the public realise how important human rights are to them. David Attenborough pointed out a few years ago that “saving our planet is now a communications challenge. We know what to do, we just need the will”. The same goes for human rights. But legal training does not make you good at communicating with folks outside your bubble. 'Legal-ese' is not the right lingo I know from personal experience. I trod a path to human rights through a law degree, masters, doctorate and then academia. Human rights folks talk about them in a way that conveys a fraction of their value and power. If you’d asked me 15 years ago why human rights are important, I’d have said things like this: ‘they protect us from abuse by the government’, or ‘they’re minimum standards of protection the state can’t breach’, or ‘they exist to protect the vulnerable’. These things are true. They’re also not very persuasive to people outside our base of support. Because the kinds of human rights breaches the movement foregrounds tend to affect ‘other people’. And lawyers are used to thinking about rights in the context of legal disputes. So human rights get reduced to a shield that protects groups or institutions that most people don’t care about, don’t understand, or who live in other countries. Human rights are not just a passive defence. They are transformational. Human rights are tools. Tools we use to demand that our leaders use the powers and resources with which we’ve entrusted them to do what’s best for all of us. Tools that we use to create the lives we want to live and the communities we want to live in. This is how we need to talk about them, especially when it comes to civil and political rights. People outside our base cannot be made to care about media freedom, the right to protest or democracy itself just on principle or because they’re enshrined in legal standards. To care about human rights, most people need to know what these things deliver. Folks will see that protest is important when we explain how it allows people like them to come together and make their leaders listen to their concerns, whether it’s about climate change or better pay for teachers. I’ve seen it first-hand when testing messages in focus groups. Empathy, not stereotypes The same goes for stimulating support for the rights of people from marginalised groups. Right now, most people have trouble caring because they been fed negative stereotypes that cause them to regard some people as ‘others’ and ‘outgroups’, meaning that they will tolerate lower standards of treatment for them. Using legal arguments and evidencing rights violations by focusing on the harm being suffered doesn’t work because it does nothing to address the reason people don’t care. For that, we need to stimulate empathy and dissolve negative stereotypes through techniques like storytelling. Once people empathise and recognise our common humanity, they’re much more likely to support equal treatment. When we communicate in a way that allows our audience to see how human rights deliver things they find important to them, they don’t just start to support human rights as standards. They also start to support the organisations that promote them. That means they’re more likely to listen to them, stand up for them, get involved in their work and even donate. It’s not just about communicating better. We also need organisers who can help people come together to carry effective messages and make the strength of public support felt by our leaders. Folks with legal training are still essential. If you’re going to make phones, you need engineers. But we don’t see the engineers being given the job of persuading folks to buy the phones, do we? Unless they’ve had proper communications training. The human rights movement’s legalistic centre of gravity needs to shift to make room for knowledge and skills that can meet the moment. In the short-term we could achieve this by retraining staff and joining forces with other progressive movements that know how to organise and mobilise, like environmental NGOs. We could also tackle the issue upstream by working with universities that produce human rights graduates to develop more holistic curricula that cover communications and organising and not only law.