Launch of New Recommendations for Implementing the Risk Approach Guidance for States on how to more efficaciously protect human rights defenders

Key take-aways:

 Over 65 human rights defenders and experts from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and North , Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast came together to craft a list of recommendations for implementing the Risk Approach

 The Risk approach has been implemented for the protection of human rights defenders for the past 15 years—by the , the Inter-American system, human rights organisations, as well as Courts of several countries.

 Human Rights advocates from topical NGOs, UN agencies, donors, academia and state protection mechanisms came together to agree on how to create risk analyses and protection plans that are empowering, situated, intersectional, and, ultimately, -centric

26 January 2021, BRUSSELS

Today, we are proud to publish the Risk Approach Recommendations, which were created in collaboration with over 65 human rights defenders and experts from around the world in order to push for improved protection practices. The document provides 21 concrete statements outlining the most essential and foundational concepts behind implementing the risk approach for protection—from conducting a situated risk approach to building an effective protection plan.

“After all these years using the risk approach, it was about time to define recommendations and standards about how best can it be applied for the protection of human rights defenders,” said Enrique Eguren, co-founder of Protection International and one of the original contributors to the first Manual for protecting human rights defenders using the risk approach.

These recommendations are meant to guide government officials--particularly those tasked with adopting public policy or involved in State protection mechanisms—as well as inform human rights defenders and organisations, providing them with a concrete reference of what they should expect from the State.

The risk approach is a widely-adopted methodology for protecting human rights defenders. After 15 years of its implementation, the human rights community came together to reflect on the immense progress that has been made but also the many challenges and misunderstandings that are preventing this methodology from achieving even greater results. The co-authors of these recommendations represent human rights organisations, coalitions of defenders, UN agencies, donors, academia, and State protection mechanisms from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. The diversity of our experiences coupled with the solidarity of our cause—to protect and defend the right to defend human rights—is ultimately what produced the resultant statements.

“We carried out this initiative using the Delphi method, which is a gradual process in which many experts from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines are all working together to come to a consensus about something,” says Meredith Veit, who helped to orchestrate the process, “We scrutinized each of these statements many times, over multiple rounds of individual surveys as well as open, virtual discussions, slightly tweaking and improving the phrasing and the content as we worked.”

These recommendations are just the beginning, and over the coming years we will continue to research and develop new initiatives for ensuring the more effective adoption of these statements in practice as well as continually improving upon the statements themselves. We highly encourage the human rights community to interpret these recommendations as ideal yet extremely achievable goals for any country they may be operating in. Advocating for these recommendations means advocating for inclusive, reasoned, and rights-based approach to protecting those that put their lives and well-being on the line for a better world for us all.

The Risk Approach Recommendations are currently available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. If you would like to translate these recommendations into another language, please let us know so that we can collaborate.

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For more information please contact: Meredith Veit [email protected] or Enrique Eguren [email protected]

For a full list of contributors, please view the final pages of the Risk Approach Recommendations.

CREATED WITH THE SUPPORT OF: