openGlobalRights overview and progress report

About

Today’s
human rights networks are sophisticated and dense, but access to important
global conversations is still restricted by geography, language, money, and
power. To address these limitations, we created openGlobalRights (oGR) in summer 2013. With support from the Ford Foundation, University
of Minnesota, and University of Ottawa, we are creating a multilingual, online
space dedicated to debating human rights strategies from all perspectives and
disciplines; global South and North; non-governmental and governmental;
activist and academic; non-legal and legal.

oGR is hosted
online by the London-based digital commons, openDemocracy. Together, we are building the world’s first all-digital, truly
global, human rights knowledge hub. We promote and nurture strategic
discussions across geographic, linguistic, political, academic, and practitioner
divides. Our goal is to broaden and diversify global human rights debates; make
those discussions more readily accessible to multiple types of actors; and
thus, to increase these debates’ potential influence.

Here’s how
we work: Every few months, we launch a new “debate” by commissioning a series
of lively commentaries, written in multiple languages, and from various perspectives.
We then extend and deepen the debate by commissioning new responses and
elaborations. The debates rarely end, as we continue to receive and publish new
contributions on past and current themes from authors around the world.

To date,
we’ve launched discussions on Emerging Powers and Human Rights; Human Rights: Mass or Elite Movement?; The Responsibility to Protect: Syria and Beyond; Funding and Human Rights; Religion and Human Rights; A New High Commissioner for Human Rights; Debating Economic and Social Rights; The International Criminal Court; Internationalizing Human Rights
Organizations, Public Opinion and Human Rights, Evaluation and Human Rights, Economic
Inequality & Human Rights and, most recently, the Future of Refugee Protection. In April 2016, we plan to launch a new debate to explore
strategies to counter Closing Space for
Civil Society in collaboration with the
Human Rights Initiative at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

In addition
to our ongoing debates, on a separate ‘openPage’ section, we publish articles on a wide variety of
strategic human rights issues. Here, our focus is on discussing ways of improving
human rights advocacy, practice and scholarship, or of advancing understanding
of the human rights dimensions of pressing global issues.

Many of our
authors live and work in the global South, and while many are from lesser-known
locations and organizations, we also commission pieces from internationally established
voices. To identify both new and less-established contributors, we work with freelance
commissioning editors in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Many of our
authors are human rights thought leaders, activists, scholars, and
professionals; others are journalists, researchers, students, and commentators.

Our roster of globally prominent authors includes Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch; Khalil Shikaki, Director
of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, Palestine; Maya Daruwala, director
of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative; Sakiko Fukuda Parr, professor of international affairs at The
New School; Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on
extreme poverty and human rights; Beth
A. Simmons, professor of international affairs
at Harvard University;
and Samuel Moyn, professor of law and
history at Harvard University.

Our newer voices include Lucia Nader, former executive director of Conectas, the Sao Paulo-based rights
group; David García Junco Machado, chief financial officer for Mexico’s National
Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT); Amel Fahmy, co-founder of HarassMap and the managing director of
Tadwein, a Gender Research Center in Egypt; Jeong-Woo Koo, a sociologist based at South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan
University; Dahlia Scheindlin, an international public opinion analyst and
strategic consultant based in Tel Aviv, Haris Azhar, coordinator of KontraS, and Zaira Drammis, International Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at
the ActionAid International Secretariat.

Many of our authors
are not professional writers, and English is often not their native tongue. To help
them craft broadly accessible essays, we work extensively with experienced,
multi-lingual editors living in Bangladesh, Canada, India, Israel, Mexico,
Nigeria, South Africa and the US. To ensure that our commentaries have depth
and cross-regional comprehensibility, we conduct additional research when
necessary, and embed hyperlinks, to open sources, for further reading. To
ensure that authors have the time they need to work on their pieces, we pay
those living in the global South modest honorariums. To overcome linguistic
barriers, we accept submissions in any language, and then translate, edit, and
back-translate. And to ensure the broadest possible distribution, we promote our
essays through multi-lingual social media channels, and arrange for cross-publication
with other websites and e-networks.

Progress

From launch
on June 17, 2013 through February 2016, our 461 original articles and 536
translations received over 1.9 million
page-views from nearly 314,000
unique readers over 454,000 website visits
(Figures 1 and 2). Readers commented over 1000 times on 306 of these pieces,
and other websites republished our material over 300 times, including on two
popular Turkish websites, T24 and Bianet; Foreign Policy, a leading US website for
international affairs; Global
Voices; and BBC-Persian. In September 2014,
the Economist
featured our debate on religion
and human rights.

Nearly 40
percent our 406 authors were born and reside in the global South,[1]
and 45% are women. Over 77% have written for us once, while the rest have written
for us two or more times (Figure 3). We have translated our articles into 20
languages, and more than half our total output is in a language other than
English.

About 39%
of our readers are return visitors, compared to 29% for openDemocracy as a
whole. On average, each visit to our website lasts nearly 6 minutes, over three
times the average for our host website, openDemocracy.

Our readers
click on at least 4 pages per visit, on average, more than double the openDemocracy
norm.

Our
Facebook pages have nearly 23,000 followers, 98% of which live in the global
South. Our pages have been tweeted, shared and “liked” over 190,000 times
(Figures 4 and 5).

In February 2014, we added social media channels in Spanish, French and Arabic, and our non-Anglophone Facebook and twitter fan base has grown to 5600.

Our Team

Our lead
editor is James Ron, a professor at the
University of Minnesota, former Human Rights Watch consultant, and former
Associated Press journalist. Our managing editor is Archana Pandya, an Indo-Canadian researcher
whose native English is supplemented by Spanish, French, Hindi and Guajrati.
Our collaborating editor is David Petrasek, a former special
advisor to the Amnesty International secretary general, now a professor at the
University of Ottawa. Our regular consulting and commissioning editors include Osai
Ojigho, a Nigerian human rights
activist and Coalition Coordinator for the State of the Union
Coalition (SOTU) based in Nairobi; Rachel Schmidt, a Canadian writer
and editor based in Ottawa, Rohini Mohan, an Indian journalist based in
Bangalore; and Lauren Royston, the Director of
Research and Advocacy at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute in
South Africa.

In recent months we have partnered with the Center for Economic and Social Rights to
develop our debate on Economic Inequality and collaborated
with the International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF) and the International Human Rights
Funders Group (IHRFG) to
develop a sub-debate on local resource
mobilization for human rights. We have also developed cross-publication
parternships with the editors of SUR International Journal on Human Rights as
well as Dejusticia’s Amphibious Accounts and Global Rights
Blogs to give more visibility to some of the important pieces they have
produced.

Notably, in November 2015, openGlobalRights held its first
author/practitioner/scholar/donor workshop on Surveys
and Human Rights in Mexico City, which was supported
by CIDE and the Stassen Chair of International Affairs at the University of
Minnesota. Many of the participants in that workshop have published
practitioner-focused articles in oGR’s Public Opinion
and Human Rights debate and are contributing to a special
issue of the scholarly Journal of Human
Rights on surveys and human rights (volume 16/ 3, 2017).

Funding

We have received
$575,000 USD from the Ford Foundation over three years (2013-16); $199,000 USD in
in-kind donations from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public
Affairs, and Department of Political Science; and roughly $25,000 USD in-kind
from the University of Ottawa.

[1] This excludes authors from
the global South who reside in the global North. We define “global South,” for
the purposes of this report, as regions other than Western Europe, New Zealand,
Australia, Canada, and the USA.