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Fellow: Robyn Linde
Summer 2004
Contact Information: 4009 19th Ave. S
Minneapolis, MN 55407
(612) 824-7466
[email protected]
Organizational Profile
Full Name of Organization:Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights
Abbreviation and initials commonly used: MAHR
Organizational Address: 650 3rd Ave. S.; Minneapolis, MN 55402-1940
Telephone number: (612) 341-3302
Fax number: (612) 341-2971
Email address: [email protected]
Names of Executive Director and Senior Staff: Robin Phillips, Cheryl Thomas
Number of Employed Staff (full-time; part-time): 17 full-time, 1 part-time
Number of Volunteers: varies
Objectives of the Organization: MAHR’s stated mission is “to implement
international human rights standards in order to promote civil society and reinforce
the rule of law. By involving volunteers in research, education, and advocacy,
we build broad constituencies in the United States and selected global communities.”
The Upper Midwest Fellowship enabled me to accept a position as an intern with
Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights (hereafter, MAHR), a pre-eminent organization
based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the field of international and national
human rights advocacy. Broad-based in its mission and pioneering in its methodology,
MAHR provides a range of investigative, legal and educational services related
to human rights promotion and protection. Since 1983, it has served as a standard-bearer
in the field of human rights advocacy through its employment of regional and
issue-area research to advance human rights norms and to secure their adoption
at all levels of governance.
In keeping with this greater mission, the Women’s Program at MAHR has
continued to break ground in its efforts of fact-finding and documentation to
take up issues that impact upon women. It conducts research into discrimination,
violence against women and trafficking of women and girls throughout the world.
Given its ambitious agenda, MAHR relies extensively on the efforts of interns
and volunteers who support staff by conducting supplemental research and assisting
with publications in progress. Over 14 publications have resulted from fact-finding
missions on women’s issues throughout the world.
My internship with MAHR lasted for 11 weeks from June to August. At MAHR, I
worked in the Women’s Human Rights Program under the supervision of Cheryl
Thomas, Christine Tefft and Rose Park. At the start of my internship, I selected
projects of interest within the current work of the program. My chosen projects
were within the criminal justice section of the Battered Immigrant Women’s
Project and the ethnic minority pages of the stopvaw.org Website.
The Battered Immigrant Women’s Project is a report documenting the particular
struggle facing immigrant women in situations of domestic violence. Drawing
on numerous interviews with members of the community including translators,
service providers and judges among others, the report chronicles the complex
factors involved in protecting battered women. These factors include problems
with translation both in court and in dealings with the police, first-visit
issues with the police, pressure from ethnic communities, stereotypes, and lack
of information about the U.S. system. Within this project, my responsibilities
were to focus on the issues involving the criminal justice system.
Stopvaw.org is a Website project that is designed to give service providers
in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth Independent States (CEE/CIS)
the tools they need to effect change in their own communities. There are four
primary issues that the Website addresses: sexual harassment, sexual assault,
domestic violence and trafficking. Additionally there are country pages for
(almost) all states in the CEE/CIS region. These country pages include updated
information on legislation, lists of human rights resources and NGOs and information
on treaty compliance. Everyone in the Women’s Program was responsible
for keeping the Website up to date. This included, among other things, scouring
international and domestic listservs, newsletters and Websites for the latest
news involving violence against women, posting these online and conducting additional
research. The site was designed to serve as a forum for discussion on issues
of violence within each country as well as provide information about actions
in other countries so that service providers can learn from others’ efforts;
MAHR’s ultimate objective is to eventually turn the site over to NGO monitors
in each of the countries.
In May, the first training session in Budapest took place. This session taught
the monitors how to update the Website. A second training session took place
in July for the CIS states.
One of my projects was to write ethnic minority pages for the Caucuses (Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan) and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. These
pages would underscore the intersection between issues of national, ethnic and
religious minorities and gender issues by looking at domestic legislation, international
compliance with law and norms and documenting the discrimination faced by each
country’s minorities.
The greatest challenge of NGO work is that nothing goes as planned. My assigned
projects took second place to the weekly news updating. Additionally, before
the CIS monitor training program in July, all of the country pages had to be
updated. I had been a volunteer at MAHR during the writing of the original country
pages yet I was amazed at the work that would go into the second draft. The
country pages had evolved since my earlier involvement and they required much
more research than the original plan. Moreover, the CIS countries did not have
the online paper trail of legislation in English that the CEE countries did.
Thanks to European Union (EU) accession, research on the CEE was relatively
easy. Research about CIS countries was labored and thus a single country page
could take a week to update.
Another lesson that I learned during my work at MAHR is that everyone participates
equally in every level, degree and variety of work. Since so much what we did
was challenging and difficult and because of the sheer amount of daily research
required, everyone was involved in every stage of the process. Therefore, interns
shared the same assignments as staff and supervisors. This was an important
factor in stressing the importance of the Website and the other responsibilities
of the program. I think interns in general felt that they were a part of a team
producing important work rather than simply seeing to the grunt work that no
one else wanted to do.
A final lesson that I learned during this experience is that NGO work is both
stimulating and rewarding. I had always imagined that academia was the only
forum in which I could feel intellectually stimulated and productive. I saw
academia as an extension of my human rights activism. I learned this summer,
however, that there are many paths to a rewarding career in human rights. Moreover,
NGO work felt so much more productive than academic work. Whereas a paper in
academia can take years before you see it in print, producing material to be
used in the CEE/CIS region offered an immediate gratification.
There are a number of ways that I plan to continue the work of my fellowship.
First, I am continuing to assist with updating the minority pages for the stopvaw.org
site. Second, I have been asked to do some court monitoring for a battered woman
immigrant case here in the Twin Cities. Third, my chosen dissertation topic,
rogue states and the abolition of execution for juvenile offenders, is a topic
of particular concern and activism on the part of MAHR. When I finish my work
with the Women’s Human Rights program I plan to continue working with
the Death Penalty Project.