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Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights

San Francisco, United States
Joined September 2020

Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights (SAHR) is a transcultural community of human rights defenders across the world united by a shared mission to end impunity for widespread SGBV.



Presence in: United States
Focus: Gender-based violence

Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights (SAHR) is a transcultural community of human rights defenders across the world united by a shared mission to end impunity for widespread sexual and gender-based violence. SAHR is committed to working on these cases to honour the fight of survivors; and to inspire a culture of accountability and legal practices that center survivors.

We envision a world where the rights of every survivor of gender violence are upheld with dignity and respect. We practice law through a feminist lens to improve survivors’ access to fair trials and reparations. We focus on a few select cases, based not on the likelihood of success, but those which involve widespread or systematic sexual violence, which include incidences involving multiple victims and/or, offenders in positions of power. This approach allows us to pursue litigation that has the possibility to inspire accountability and survivor-centered legal practices, and allows us to invest deeply in the human rights lawyers and defenders we work with.

Over the past decade, our commitment to shattering patriarchal structures has had an invaluable impact on the lives of hundreds of gender violence survivors all over the world. Since our inception, SAHR has been working with human rights defenders and survivor-advocates across Afghanistan, Kashmir, South Sudan, Italy, Libya, Ukraine, Vanuatu and India, to ensure that their rights are vigorously defended in the judicial process. In Muslim contexts, we work to craft legal arguments to enforce survivors’ rights, which are compatible with Islamic law. Our groundbreaking work has seen dozens of survivors secure their freedom and receive reparations for wrongful convictions.