Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

This new crowdsourcing site allows anyone to use their skills to advance basic human rights

One of the questions I most often get asked is: ‘What can I do?’  If you agree that actual liberals are the only palatable future in authoritarian societies and also recognise that they are a beleaguered minority, is there anything you can meaningfully do to help?

Western governments are generally too busy doing business with authoritarian governments to focus on actual human rights abuses.  Meanwhile many groups at home which claim to care about human rights around the world are too busy attacking the world’s only democracies or defending extremists to have much time left for the real fight.

But I have recently been introduced to an initiative which stands a good chance of providing an answer to that difficult readers’ question.  ‘Advancing Human Rights’ is an organisation which does the heavy lifting on human rights around the world, supporting dissidents in authoritarian regimes.  It doesn’t yet have the profile of an Amnesty or Human Rights Watch, but as plenty of recent stories have shown, those organisations long ago landed on the wrong side.

Besides, today there shouldn’t be any need to rely on a single organisation or collection of organisations.  It should be up to people to make a difference.  To this end ‘Advancing Human Rights’ has decided not to collect power to itself but to spread around the opportunity to do good as widely as possible.  Their latest initiative aims to bring the resources of the internet – which have so often been malign for real human rights – to advance real human rights.  As they say: ‘Technology, when used wisely, can shatter barriers between activists and the outside world.  In the struggle for human rights, everyone has a role to play.’

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