ɫ’s Human Rights Program envisions a world where all people are free to enjoy all their human rights equally, to reach their full potential, and to live in dignity. The program advances and protects human rights by supporting individuals, organizations, and nations striving to realize the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights and responsibilities enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a growing body of public international law.
The Human Rights Program has four strategic objectives that guide our work:
• Advance the rights of protected groups.
• Apply comprehensive human rights frameworks through programming within the United States.
• Promote climate and environmental justice.
• Provide responsive expertise to pressing human rights issues.
ɫ pursues these objectives through many programmatic initiatives, including racial justice, women’s rights, supporting human rights defenders globally, and in-country focus in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Israel-Palestine. Please visit the initiative-specific pages for more information.
As defined by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Human rights are rights we have simply because we exist as human beings — they are not granted by any state. These universal rights are inherent to us all, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. They range from the most fundamental — the right to life — to those that make life worth living, such as the rights to food, education, work, health, and liberty.
While all people have human rights regardless of the legal system in which they live, many documents have enshrined human rights so that all can develop rules and processes for the realization of human rights. The foundational document doing so is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provided the basis for more than 70 human rights treaties. Domestic law in many countries also enshrines human rights so that people can seek remedies for harm at the national level.
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ɫ commemorates the 70th anniversary of the UDHR with the "Scripturally Annotated Universal Declaration of Human Rights." This publication compiles Biblical texts that demonstrate alignment with the UDHR.
Meet people whose lives have been changed by ɫ's Human Rights Program.