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Advocacy is an activity by an individual or group that aims to influence decisions within political, economic, and social institutions. Advocacy includes activities and publications to influence public policy, laws and budgets by using facts, their relationships, the media, and messaging to educate government officials and the public. Advocacy can include many activities that a person or organization undertakes including media campaigns, public speaking, commissioning and publishing research. Lobbying is a form of advocacy where a direct approach is made to legislators on a specific issue or specific piece of legislation. Research has started to address how advocacy groups in the United States and Canada are using social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action.
Environmental racism is a concept in the environmental justice movement, which developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The term is used to describe environmental injustice that occurs in practice and in policy within a racialized context. In a national context, environmental racism criticizes inequalities between urban and exurban areas after white flight. Charges of environmental racism can also prompt usages of civil rights legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prosecute environmental crimes in the areas in which racialized people live. Internationally, environmental racism can refer to the effects of the global waste trade, like the negative health impact of the export of electronic waste to China from developed countries.
Environmental justice emerged as a concept in the United States in the early 1980s. The term has two distinct uses with the more common usage describing a social movement that focuses on the “fair” distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. The other use is an interdisciplinary body of social science literature that includes theories of the environment and justice, environmental laws and their implementations, environmental policy and planning and governance for development and sustainability, and political ecology.
Equality Now is a non-governmental organization founded in 1992 to advocate for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls. Through a combination of regional partnerships, community mobilization and legal advocacy the organization works to encourage governments to adopt, improve and enforce laws that protect and promote women and girls' rights around the world.
A human rights defender or human rights activist is a person who, individually or with others, acts to promote or protect human rights. They can be journalists, environmentalists, whistle-blowers, trade unionists, lawyers, teachers, housing campaigners, or just individuals acting alone. They can defend rights as part of their jobs or in a voluntary capacity. As a result of their activities, they can sometimes be the subject of reprisals and attacks of all kinds, including smears, surveillance, harassment, false charges, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the right to freedom of association, and physical attacks.
Global Rights is an international human rights capacity-building non-governmental organization (NGO). Founded in Washington, D.C., in 1978 with the name International Human Rights Law Group, the organization changed its name to Global Rights: Partners for Justice in 2003 on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. In December 2014 it shut its Washington headquarters and devolved the center of its operations to its country office in Nigeria and Burundi from where the organization continues to work with local activists in Africa to promote and protect the rights of marginalized populations. It provided technical assistance and training to enable local partners to document and expose human rights abuses, conduct community outreach and mobilization, advocate for legal and policy reform, and provide legal and paralegal services.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, formerly called the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, is an umbrella group of American civil rights interest groups.
The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit environmental health and justice organization based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 2000, the organization works with communities neighboring state oil refineries and chemical plants to address air quality issues.
Mossville is a small, predominantly African American unincorporated community on the outskirts of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, United States. It is part of the Lake Charles Metropolitan Statistical Area and is sandwiched between Sulphur to the west and Westlake to the east. With the Sasol expansion project almost all of the homes north of Old Spanish Trail have now been either moved to other locations or torn down and the land completely deforested.
Climate justice is a term used for framing global warming as an ethical and political issue, rather than one that is purely environmental or physical in nature. This is done by relating the effects of climate change to concepts of justice, particularly environmental justice and social justice and by examining issues such as equality, human rights, collective rights, and the historical responsibilities for climate change. A fundamental proposition of climate justice is that those who are least responsible for climate change suffer its gravest consequences.
Reproductive justice is "the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities," according to SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the first organization founded to build a reproductive justice movement. In 1997, 16 women-of-color-led organizations representing four communities of color – Native American, Latin American, African American, and Asian American – then launched the nonprofit SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective to build a national reproductive justice movement. Additional organizations began to form or reorganize themselves as reproductive justice organizations starting in the early 2000s.
Amnesty International is a non-governmental organization with its headquarters in the United Kingdom focused on human rights. The organization says it has more than eight million members and supporters around the world.
Canadian Race Relations Foundation is a charitable organization and Crown corporation responsible to foster racial harmony and cross-cultural understanding and help to eliminate racism in Canada. The foundation was opened in November 1997, after the bill establishing it received royal assent on February 1, 1991. The Foundation operates at "arms length" from the government and is a registered charity. The Foundation is led by a board of directors appointed by the federal government as selected by the Prime Minister's Office by recommendations from the Minister of Canadian Heritage, currently Mélanie Joly. Previously, such advice came from the Minister for Multiculturalism, last held by Jason Kenney.
Robert Doyle Bullard is former Dean of the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs and currently Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Previously Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard is known as the 'father of environmental justice'. He has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the United States in the 1980s.
Kumi Naidoo is a South African-born human rights activist of Indian descent who was the Secretary-General of Amnesty International until December 2019. Naidoo was also the first African head of Greenpeace, an international environmentalist group, serving as its International Executive Director from 2009 to 2015. After battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s through the Helping Hands Youth Organisation, Naidoo led global campaigns to end poverty and protect human rights. He has served as the Secretary-General of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and of Civicus, an international alliance for citizen participation, from 1998 to 2008. Recently, he led the Global Call for Climate Action, which brings together environmental aid, religious and human rights groups, labour unions, scientists and others and has organised mass demonstrations around climate negotiations.. He was the launch director of Africans Rising for peace justice and dignity.
A sustainability organization is (1) an organized group of people that aims to advance sustainability and/or (2) those actions of organizing something sustainably. Unlike many business organizations, sustainability organizations are not limited to implementing sustainability strategies which provide them with economic and cultural benefits attained through environmental responsibility. For sustainability organizations, sustainability can also be an end in itself without further justifications.
Sombath Somphone is an internationally acclaimed community development worker and prominent member of Lao civil society. Sombath was abducted from a Vientiane street in 2012 and has not been seen since.
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) is a network of indigenous, grassroots environmental justice activists, primarily based in the United States. Group members have represented Native American concerns at international events such as the United Nations Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2016). IEN organizes an annual conference to discuss proposed goals and projects for the coming year; each year the conference is held in a different indigenous nation. The network emphasizes environmental protection as a form of spiritual activism. IEN received attention in the news as a major organizer of the fight against the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Human Rights Defense Center is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that campaigns on behalf of prisoner rights across the United States. The organization advocates for the rights of people in "state and federal prisons, local jails, immigration detention centers, civil commitment facilities, Bureau of Indian Affairs jails, juvenile facilities and military prisons." Some of the major focuses of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) include work on free speech issues, government transparency and accountability, as well as opposition to the private prison industry.
References
- ↑ Staff. "UDHR Campaign 2013 Spotlight: Mossville Environmental Action Now". US Human Rights Network. US Human Rights Network. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
- 1 2 Cahill-Jackson, Jeannine (1 May 2012). "Mossville Environmental Action Now v. United States: Is a Solution to Environmental Injustice Unfolding?". Pace International Review Online Companion. 3 (6): 174.
- ↑ Louisiana Secretary of State. "Mossville Environmental Action Now". Louisiana Secretary of State Business Filings. Louisiana Depart of State. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
- ↑ Staff. "IACHR Admits Cases Involving Ancestral Lands and 'Environmental Racism'". International Justice Resource Center. International Justice Resource Center. Retrieved 2 December 2016.