Here at Rights & Security International (RSI), we find many reasons for optimism. We have been increasing our impact in line with detailed strategic plans for each of our projects, raising our profile both internationally and within the UK, greatly expanding our advocacy relationships, and retaining a dedicated and skilled team. Most of our current funders have awarded us multiple or multi-year grants, thanks to conscientious relationship-building. Despite challenging economic times and upheavals among funders in the UK charity sector, we have grown in size during the past few years and have developed increasingly effective work.
However, in order to remain impactful, we realise we will need to deepen our connections with people who are directly affected by the issues we address, both within the UK and internationally. Our work will also need to have a broader and more demonstrable benefit for individual lives, and we will need to ensure that we are accountable to directly affected people and communities.
Under the plan outlined below, RSI would become the UK’s pre-eminent charity promoting the freedoms of thought, religion, belief and opinion, along with the freedom to express those views and ideas (as well as one’s identity).
This refinement of our mission would mean a move away from the strict focus on ‘security’ issues we adopted when we rebranded as Rights & Security International in 2020. However, this change would not mean a loss of focus, and in fact would allow us to be more targeted and therefore more effective. It would also reconnect us with our roots in anti-discrimination and accountability work, which we have been pursuing since our early days in Northern Ireland.
We would also become one of the most effective international organisations promoting these rights at the national level in locations where local partners request our help and where there is a gap in support from UK organisations, such as Latin America and East Africa. We would maintain a concerted effort to tackle ‘national security’ laws that harm the rights listed above, but we would no longer limit ourselves to working on issues or legislation that governments describe explicitly as ‘security’ matters. As discussed below, we think our earlier ‘security’ framing has become both over- and under-inclusive – including because governments are taking bad models from ‘national security’ programmes (such as massive surveillance, heavy immigration restrictions and crackdowns on protests) and applying them to other areas, such as environmental movements.
Our project work will be organised into three divisions: Freedom of Expression and Belief; Migration, Citizenship and Belonging; and Advancing and Protecting Human Rights Movements. All these divisions will work both in the UK and internationally, to aid our gradual internationalisation while deepening our connections with UK partners and communities. We will develop an advice service for migrants in the UK and continue creating anti-Islamophobia and anti-racism projects to help us directly serve some of the people most impacted by the human rights issues we address. Work related to climate justice movements, gender justice, digital rights and the misuse of AI would be integrated into the work of each division.
However, we remain informed by our unique – and ongoing – history as a London-based organization established to investigate abuses in Northern Ireland and demand transparency and accountability from the UK government for its role in these harms.
We recall that some of the key aspects of our most successful work from 1990 until our internationalisation in 2020 included factfinding regarding serious alleged abuses; advocating for concrete accountability measures such as official inquiries and the release of secret documents; providing direct guidance and support to families of people in Northern Ireland who were killed during the conflict; and helping families and survivors from Northern Ireland engage in advocacy at Westminster and the UN.
We will continue building on this legacy by doing – and expanding on – some of the things we have always done best:
- Carrying out fact-finding investigations of alleged abuses and supporting others to do the same.
- Using international law – particularly human rights law – as a tool for change in reform efforts at the national level.
- Helping activists develop and take advantage of specific, effective tools and advocacy opportunities, especially at the international level, where governments can be pressured to make changes.
These elements combine to form our organisation-wide theory of change: we find the facts about what a government is doing that harms rights, develop advocacy plans together with our partners and impacted people, then use litigation and campaigns at both the international and national levels to achieve change. Each of our projects also rests on a specific theory of change.
We have become adept at using a variety of activities to pursue our goals, from freedom-of-information requests and legal challenges to parliamentary and UN advocacy, coalition-building, and (at a small scale) grant-making. We will continue to take this ‘Swiss army knife’ approach to achieving impact and change, with all staff trained in a variety of skills.
