The Advocates for Human Rights has released its first edition of Discover Human Rights: A Human Rights Approach to Social Justice, a training manual aimed to help civil society organizations in the United States use human rights to combat entrenched poverty, discrimination, and injustice.

This manual, intended for U.S. social justice advocates, provides concrete steps for integrating international human rights principles into their work. First, this manual helps advocates frame the issues on which they work in terms of international human rights standards. Next, the manual helps advocates identify human rights-based strategies they can use to ensure these rights are fulfilled for all people.

This manual is designed to accompany the training Discover Human Rights: A Human Rights Approach to Social Justice. It also provides participants with a reference to use when they return to their organizations or communities. Using a participatory methodology, this manual combines short presentations with interactive activities including large group discussions, small group work, and role plays. In addition, the manual incorporates case study examples of best practices drawn from the experiences of social justice organizations around the United States and provides tools such as organizational assessments and implementation models to help organizations create an action plan for using human rights principles in their operations and advocacy work.

The manual is broken into three separate modules:

• Module 1: International Human Rights. This module is a primer on human rights and the international human rights system and also explores the connection between human rights and social justice work in the United States.

• Module 2: Strategies of a Human Rights Approach. This module sets out the key definitions, principles, and elements of a human rights approach. Four key strategies for how to apply a human rights approach are explained in detail, as well as how these strategies affect an organization’s social justice work in terms of planning and actions.

• Module 3: Applying a Human Rights Approach. This module introduces practical tools that can be used to implement a human rights approach, culminating in the creation of a concrete action plan. Each of the tools provided corresponds to one of the different human rights-based strategies explained in Module 2. 

Madeline Lohman, one of the co-authors, sees the training manual as a potentially transformative tool: “By adopting a human rights approach, social justice advocates can change the way we view injustices like poverty and discrimination – not as the result of bad personal choices or bad luck, but as a systematic failure of our society to ensure that all people can live in dignity.”

Click here to download a free PDF of Discover Human Rights: A Human Rights Approach to Social Justice.

Click here to order a bound hard copy for $25: http://discoverhumanrights.org/order_form.html