Human Rights Advocacy

Since June 2023, CHRSD's Human Rights Advocacy programme has run three connected tracks across all 12 districts where we work: community rights-education workshops in villages and garment factories, systematic documentation of rights violations — with particular attention to climate displacement — and strategic public-interest litigation carried out alongside our Legal Aid clinics. In just over three years the programme has documented more than 4,000 cases and supported 40 strategic lawsuits spanning land rights, women's rights, and disability rights, reaching more than 55,000 rights-holders directly.

Rights education comes first: workshops run inside villages and, increasingly, inside garment factories, walk rights-holders through the protections the law already gives them — land tenure, labour rights, protection from gender-based violence — in language that doesn't require a legal background to use. Many people who enter our documentation process start as workshop participants who recognised their own situation in the material.

Documentation is the programme's evidentiary backbone. Field officers record rights violations with named dates, locations, and, where consent allows, named individuals — with particular attention to violations tied to climate displacement, where the loss of land or livelihood to flooding, salinity intrusion, or erosion often triggers a cascade of secondary rights violations that a single-issue programme would miss entirely.

Strategic litigation is where documentation becomes leverage. Working alongside CHRSD's Legal Aid clinics, we select cases not only for the harm they redress but for the precedent they can set — the 40 lawsuits supported to date span land-rights disputes, women's rights cases, and disability-rights claims, chosen because a favourable outcome protects people well beyond the original plaintiff.