Human rights advocates play a crucial role in advancing respect for human rights around the world, through investigating alleged abuses and seeking reform, accountability, and justice through education, social movement organizing, litigation, and advocacy.
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This work often exposes advocates to human rights abuses, traumatic events, and stressors of many forms. Advocates handle physical evidence, review documents that contain evidence or allegations of human rights violations, conduct interviews with victims of and witnesses to abuse, visit sites to examine physical evidence of human rights violations (such as mass graves, morgues, detention centers), and they may directly witness torture, killings, beatings, rapes, civil disturbances, armed conflict, and extreme poverty. Human rights advocates are often from the communities on whose behalf they are advocating, and are also at risk of being taken hostage, abducted, tortured, beaten, sexually assaulted, arrested, detained, or even killed in connection with their work.  In many parts of the world, the space for organizing and advancing human rights is shrinking, as governments and non-state actors target human rights advocates.​
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