Daily Brief Audio Series

It’s a question that comes up often from Daily Brief followers and others: how do you get a job working in human rights?

It usually comes from someone who’s younger, maybe a bit idealistic, and eager to do something useful with their life.

There are, of course, many others who get involved in human rights not because they want to but really because they have to – as a survivor, for example, connected to a cause through tragic personal experience.

But the following seven points are for the former: for those attracted to the job as a profession and who have a choice of doing something else. Beware: this may not be the advice you expect.

1) Accept you will never earn as much as you could doing something else. If you’re younger and just starting out, this may not seem very important, but you should still give some thought to how this type of work will impact your earnings negatively over the course of your lifetime. If you’re mid-career and thinking about shifting to human rights work “to give something back,” then calculate very carefully how much you’re giving back – you may be unpleasantly surprised.

2) Understand it’s not romantic. It’s many things, but it’s also a job. Yes, the issues are important, and the work can give you a sense of purpose, but that has plusses and minuses. If you go into it with self-sacrificing zeal, if you make it your whole life, you will burn out.

3) Understand it’s not glamorous. You may get to meet some truly incredible people. You will very likely be inspired by them. But fanboyism weakens over time, and you may occasionally even realize why people say, “Never meet your heroes.”

4) Realize people who work in human rights are just like everyone else – not always easy to get along with. We all share a spirit and strive together for our larger goals, but we still have disagreements. There are egos, jealousies, and frustrations. Office politics don’t magically disappear just because you’re all working for a good cause.

5) Realize it’s emotionally draining. You never get used to the daily whiplash of feelings – one moment contemplating the depths of human depravity and the next moment marveling at human resilience in the face of it. You will need to develop strategies to protect yourself, like not looking at the worst photos if you can avoid it.

6) Know you will lose often and never be satisfied. You will learn about many more horrors than you will ever be able to even try to help end. Human rights work can achieve significant wins, but honestly, losing is more common. You and your colleagues are always in an underdog’s position, fighting against governments, large corporations, and other powers that have far more resources, money, and people than human rights organizations do.

7) Realize that where you can do the most good may not be where you first think it is. Many folks want to work on the frontline, gathering evidence in challenging situations. Some may even have the language skills and cool-headed temperament for it.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll get that job. You still may not be the right person for getting survivors to feel comfortable relating their stories, nor the right messenger for convincing authorities to change their policies.

You may find you can contribute more to the cause by sitting at your laptop reviewing expense forms or coordinating a Zoom meeting about advocacy strategies. For every one person out in the field listening to victims of human rights abuses, there are 20 people doing something else somewhere else to support the work. The cause needs all sorts of people doing all sorts of jobs.

You may even find you can serve the cause best by doing something else entirely, making some money, and donating some of it to human rights causes. It’s as frontline as anything else: very little would happen in human rights work without such generous folks.

Let’s make this a conversation. These seven points will hopefully spark further questions and thoughts. Do please send themby email, Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. And when you contact us, please let us know if we can use your name if we publish your words in a future edition of the Daily Brief.

No matter how bad things are right now, they can always get worse.

That sounds depressing, but, believe it or not, there’s also a seed of hope in it.

We look at expanding conflicts in the Middle East, eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere – all filled with atrocities and all dragging in more and more countries – and we hear serious voices saying a third world war has already started.

We see authoritarians expanding their repression or threatening to take power in one country after another. We watch governments supposedly founded on democracy and human rights principles hijacked by powerful politicians attacking powerless refugees to stoke fear and then turn that fear into votes, regardless of the consequences of increasing hate.

And with immediate crises getting all the attention, other critical issues – things like climate change and growing inequality – get shoved to the back burner, where they are allowed to keep boiling over, spreading more suffering and, ultimately, driving more crises.

If you’re paying attention at all right now, you’re deeply worried about the state of the world. And if you’re at all honest with yourself, you’re even more concerned about what happens next. You know it could get even worse.

No one knows for sure what will unfold in the coming years, the coming months, the coming weeks, tomorrow. We can only say for sure what our guiding star out of this darkness should be: a firm dedication to universal human rights.

We must insist and keep insisting, louder and louder, that our governments respect individuals and their fundamental rights. Every individual, even the most powerless, especially the most powerless.

Sometimes it works, and we see some positive steps. Yes, more often it doesn’t, and abuses keep happening and sometimes get even worse or more widespread. But if we feel a sense of deepening disaster, that’s not a reason to give up; it’s a call to redouble our efforts.

Whatever happens next – whether things continue as bad as they are or get even worse – we know there’s one way to make things better.

Human rights are at stake in the US elections next week.

We’ve already discussed here in the Daily Brief how US voters should be guided by thinking about their own family’s past and considering their own family’s future. We’ve also looked at serious threats to the democratic process itself in the US.

Today, we’re going to get more specific and look at one key question in these elections: do you have the right to decide what happens to your own body? Or should the government control your body, making medical decisions for you?

Wait, what kind of question even is that? Of course, you have a right to your own body. If you don’t have that right, what rights do you have? It’s your body. The government should butt out.

And yet, this is essentially the question being put to voters in ballot initiatives in ten different US states in these elections. Millions of people will be asked to defend this basic right, bodily autonomy.

The US has been sliding backwards on this issue for years, particularly since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. Thirteen US states now ban abortion completely, and many others have harshly restricted access.

And wherever the government has been ordering people what to do with their bodies, the impacts on health and lives have been devastating. The horror stories keep piling up. Last month, for example, ProPublica reported two women had died due to the abortion ban in the US state of Georgia. 

Just yesterday, it was reported a woman died in Texas after being told it would be a crime for doctors to hurry her miscarriage in progress. The medical team apparently said they couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. She suffered through 40 hours of trauma and died of infection three days later, leaving her husband a widower and four-year-old daughter without a mother.

Laws written by politicians willfully ignorant of human biology are leaving medical professionals unable to – or afraid to – provide care that’s needed. Those politicians have put the government in control of our bodies, completely at odds with our fundamental rights.

In the abortion-related measures on the ballot in ten US states, most would enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Some ballot measures would expand abortion access in states where it is restricted. Other measures would safeguard abortion in states where it is already accessible.

Taken together, most of these state ballot measures would help restore abortion access for tens of millions of people.

Voters in these states are being asked to defend a basic right – bodily autonomy. They shouldn’t have to, of course. A fundamental right like this should be unquestionable.

And yet, here we are, in 2024, still having to fight the government for control of our own bodies. 

We can all likely remember when people used to say, “if only the world knew!”

They would be looking at a crisis or conflict filled with appalling atrocities, and they thought outside governments were merely unaware of what was going on. Or they thought, if the horrific facts were more widely known, politicians would be under unavoidable public pressure to do something.

In other words, people believed the only thing preventing the world from stopping atrocities in Ruritania was a lack of information about them.

Hardly anyone believes this today.

Sure, a few activists and a couple as-yet-unjaded journalists desperately chasing that one story, that one photo or video, they think is going to finally move the world to act on the horrific situation in Ruritania. But they soon learn the world simply doesn’t work like that anymore.

The truth is, the idea that stopping atrocities is mostly a matter of spreading awareness about them probably died many years ago. Don’t ask which crisis put an end to the notion - it’s been weakening further and further with each crisis.

Governments have always had access to intelligence and surely knew what was happening in various Ruritanias better than most people. But increasingly over the years with the explosion of information channels, especially social media, awareness is widespread. It’s not only governments that can’t claim ignorance about what’s going on, it’s everyone. The information is everywhere.

And reliable information is easily at hand, too. Even in conflict situations, when warring parties are throwing out lies and disinformation to gain support – or at least, to cause confusion – there are trustworthy sources folks can depend on. This is where Human Rights Watch and other organizations come in, with facts found through meticulous research, all publicly available.

But even reliable information on its own is not enough – facts are not enough – to get governments to act. They need to be convinced, cajoled, and sometimes embarrassed into doing the right thing. That’s why Human Rights Watch and other groups don’t just have researchers but also advocates and media experts, people whose job it is to help do the convincing.

It is not easy to persuade governments to do something on any issue. Politicians have their own priorities, and doing anything likely costs public money and, more importantly for them, their time, the rarest of all resources. Political will often just isn’t there.

But: it’s not our job to moan about a lack of political will; it’s our job to create it. This means changing politicians’ calculations and raising the costs of their inaction.

We all wish ending atrocities were as easy as saying “if only the world knew!” and then sharing the facts. We all understand, it’s much, much harder than that. 

In the early morning hours of October 25, 2004, more than 1,000 ethnic Malay Muslim men, women, and children gathered in front of the Tak Bai district police station in southern Thailand.

Some were there to protest what they believed to be the unjust detention of six village defense volunteers who were arrested for allegedly providing government-issued weapons to separatist insurgents.

Others said they went to Tak Bai to go to the market and got stuck in the crowd. Some said they were bystanders, watching what was going on.

The situation got heated, and what followed can only be described as a massacre.

Seven protesters were shot dead. The army crammed about 1,300 people into 26 military trucks and took them to an army detention facility more than 150 kilometers away, causing 78 to be crushed to death. The army held the others for several days without appropriate medical attention, leading to amputations and other severe injuries.

Today, 20 years later, successive Thai governments have failed to bring to justice former officials charged with murder and other offenses connected with the massacre, despite overwhelming evidence against them.

The victims of this violent crackdown and their families have never given up on their quest for justice.

Earlier this year, Tak Bai victims and their families filed lawsuits and Thailand’s attorney general brought another case in September. In all, 14 officials have been charged; all have fled and are now facing arrest warrants.

This may sound like progress, but for the fact that article 95 of Thailand’s Criminal Code states there is a 20-year statute of limitations, meaning no new legal action can be taken.

In the face of the decades-long injustice for Tak Bai victims, all the more reasons for the Thai government should amend this article. There should be no statute of limitations for serious violations of human rights under international law.