Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

By Jo Becker

Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, President Barack Obama said last Monday, invoking three of America’s greatest social movements. “The most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still,” he said.

The struggle for human dignity continues, though the hallmarks of those historic movements—rallies, sit-ins, and freedom rides—have evolved to include new information technologies, sophisticated human rights frameworks, and networks that span the globe.

Obama’s words reinvigorated the struggle for justice. But how specifically can we get there, especially in places where powerful government authorities are determined to prevent change? Recent human rights victories around the world illustrate some key principles for achieving social justice.

First research, investigation, and documentation are powerful advocacy tools. No movement can succeed without facts to back up its claims. The international campaigns for treaties to ban anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, and the use of child soldiers, among others, depended on solid research to demonstrate the harmful effects and scale of violations.

As just one example, when activists began in the late 1990s to campaign for a United Nations treaty to ban the use of children under age 18 as soldiers in armed conflict, they found that some diplomats were skeptical about the severity of the problem. Advocates then undertook research showing that hundreds of thousands of child soldiers were being used in wars in nearly 30 countries. As part of a broad-based, global campaign, the advocates provided compelling case studies of children forced to fight in wars. The United Nations subsequently adopted a treaty banning the use of child soldiers, which has been ratified by 150 countries. Both the number of child soldiers worldwide and the number of countries where they fight have dropped by half.

Campaigns also are more likely to succeed if they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. For example, organizations across Africa, working with international groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, used numerous strategies to bring the former Liberian president Charles Taylor to trial for war crimes related to his support of rebels in Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war.

When his presidency of Liberia became embattled in 2003, Taylor was offered asylum by Nigeria to induce him to step down. The Campaign Against Impunity  filed court cases, engaged national and international media, the U.N. Security Council, the European Parliament, and individual governments (notably the United States). When Taylor disappeared from his Nigerian villa on the eve of a scheduled meeting between Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and President George W. Bush in 2006, activists and members of Congress pressured Bush to cancel the meeting unless Obasanjo apprehended Taylor and turned him over for trial.

The strategy worked. Taylor became the first former head of state since Nuremburg to be convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal. He is serving 50 years in prison.

Campaigns are more likely to succeed when they bring together a broad range of individuals and groups as a unified voice, and are even stronger if they engage unlikely allies that broaden the campaign’s appeal. For decades in California, for example, criminal sentences had grown tougher, with decreasing regard for the nature of the crime or the offender. But last year, a coalition won a new California law providing juvenile offenders sentenced to life in prison without parole a chance for eventual release. Across the United States, violating international law, approximately 2,500 inmates have been sentenced to die in prison for crimes committed before they were considered mature enough to vote.

Fair Sentencing for Youth pulled together not only human rights groups, law professors, religious leaders, and students, but also former prosecutors, the state prison wardens union, and even some families of murder victims who were killed by juveniles. Campaign leaders were able to persuade the prison wardens that inmates with no hope of release were more likely to become dangerous to other inmates and to prison guards. One of the most unlikely allies was the conservative former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who argued that young people often change for the better. With the new state law passed in August, juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole in California have the chance to petition for release after serving 25 years.

Many of the best campaigns take advantage of specific events or developments that offer unique advocacy opportunities. One dramatic example was the courageous organizing in Libya by family members of 1,200 prisoners who were massacred by security forces at the Abu Salim prison in 1996. In 2004, the prisoners’ families began taking advantage of modest political reforms. They started to speak out about the massacre and press for the truth. They won unexpected concessions from the government of Muammar Gaddafi, including an acknowledgement of the massacre and compensation offers. In 2011, as the Arab Spring began to sweep the Middle East, the families’ spokesman was arrested. Bolstered by years of organizing and public demonstrations, the families protested, sparking large-scale demonstrations across Libya. Those protests helped bring about the six-month armed uprising that brought down the Gaddafi regime.

Finally, like the activists from Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, those most affected by human rights violations make the most effective and credible leaders for change. Recently, some of the world’s most exploited workers won one of the most significant human rights victories of the last decade. Domestic workers—housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers employed in private homes—number 50 to 100 million globally, are often excluded from national labor laws and face severe abuses hidden behind the doors of private homes.

Although the International Labor Organization (ILO) had recognized as early as 1965 the need for global labor standards for domestic workers, it was only after domestic workers themselves began mobilizing for a minimum wage, rest days, overtime pay, and other rights enjoyed by other workers that laws began to change. Forming their own unions and associations, they won national labor protections in countries like Bolivia, Peru, Tanzania, and South Africa, and in June 2011, secured an overwhelming vote from governments for an international labor rights treaty that assures domestic workers the same labor rights as other workers.

No social movement succeeds with a single strategy. The most effective use every possible means to overcome roadblocks to success. These strategies can help both important social movements in the United States and around the globe move forward, to achieve real change and protect the rights of the most vulnerable.

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Jo Becker is the children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch and the author of Campaigning for Justice: Human Rights Advocacy in Practice (Stanford University Press, 2013). Follow her on Twitter @jobeckerhrw

[Photo Courtesy to Bobo Yip]