About

Human Rights Defenders ("The Defenders") is a new non-for-profit organisation, headquartered in London (UK Company House Registration Number 09064737), focusing on defending human rights through strategic litigation and through other forms of strategic actions against those committing breaches.

There are now many voices and NGOs telling us what is wrong globally with Human Rights. However, there are few independent NGOs, which are globally and at a systemic level, enforcing and/or taking legal actions against human rights breaches and neo-dictatorships (or dictatorships disguised as democracies).

Local enforcers (national courts and local legal systems) in most weak democracies and neo-dictatorships, tend not to function properly or are controlled by the ruling regimes, having a perverted effect.

Similarly, supra-national enforcers (like the European Court of Justice or the International Court of Justice) are not proactive, possibly too detached from local problems and bureaucratic to be a real deterrent.

The above problem is perhaps the main reason why an independent enforcer like us is needed to fill the gap between local enforcers and supra-national enforcers, and to address the systemic failures of the current human rights enforcement model.