ISHR is excited to announce that the Human Rights Advocates Program's 2025-26 Annual Program Report is now available!
ISHR wishes to congratulate 2023-24 Advocate Amisha Adhikari who graduated from Georgetown Law in May of 2026.
2025-26 Advocate Christopher Rutledge's opinion article on the defining contradictions of South Africa’s constitutional democracy has been published by Independent Online (IOL).
2023-24 Advocates Andrea Tock of Guatemala and David Samuel Mejía travelled to Zimbabwe through NYU's Legal Empowerment Learning Exchange Lab to work with community members on using Participatory Action Research and Legal Empowerment tools to make their voices heard and their rights respected.
This is the second installment in a series of profiles of the Advocates in our 2025-2026 cohort, written in their own voices. This time we have Christopher Rutledge, Executive Director of MACUA-WAMUA Advice Office (MWAO), a South African non-profit established to support mining-affected communities.
The 2025-26 Advocates sat down to share their work with viewers of the HRAP YouTube Channel.
This is the first in a series of profiles of the Advocates in our 2025-2026 cohort, written in their own voices. We begin with Maiya Shang, Asia Pacific Grants Coordinator at the International Indigenous Women's Forum (FIMI), who has spent this spring as an HRAP Advocate at Columbia while attending her first session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Seven HRAP advocates from Belarus, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania closed their fellowship at a farewell reception hosted by ISHR at Columbia University on Wednesday, April 29, 2026.
Christopher Rutledge of the 2025-26 cohort of the Human Rights Advocates Program (HRAP) joined a Columbia Law School panel on 28 April 2026 reflecting on pathways into human rights work, drawing on three decades of grassroots organizing in South Africa. Rutledge serves as Executive Director of Mining Affected Communities United in Action and Women Affected by Mining United in Action Advice Office.
The gender hierarchies prevailing across much of Africa today were shaped by colonial encounter, not indigenous tradition. That was the working premise that HRAP advocate Nyawira Wahito brought to a Columbia symposium on Friday, April 24, where she argued that the work of African feminist liberation is closer to recovery than to reform. The symposium asked how rights frameworks become real institutions, curricula, and care structures.
As civic space narrows across much of the world and social movements contend with state repression, rising surveillance, and the fraying of community life, what can the Global South offer those seeking to organize for a more just future? That question animated a panel discussion at Barnard College on April 22, where three participants in Columbia University's Human Rights Advocates Program (HRAP) shared lessons drawn from their work in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.
In late March 2026, the Daily Maverick featured 2014 Advocate Carol Dyantyi and her decades-long commitment to caring for children left behind by the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa.