Fortify Rights

I am Matthew Smith, CEO of Fortify Rights, an award-winning human rights organization I co-founded in 2013. I’m a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a 2014 Echoing Green Global Fellow. Previously, I worked with Human Rights Watch, EarthRights International, and Kerry Kennedy, President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. I’ve worked in Southeast Asia for the last 15 years documenting human rights violations and supporting local human rights defenders. My work has exposed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, multi-billion-dollar corruption, and other human rights violations. I’ve written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Guardian, and others, and I've discussed human rights on CNN, Al Jazeera, and other networks. I am now writing my first book.

The world’s leading international human rights groups do indispensable work; however, they typically operate at a measured distance from survivors and local-level activists to maintain “objectivity” and “independent” monitoring. An unintended byproduct of this approach is that local-led efforts are commonly viewed as biased or lacking credibility. It’s time for the human rights movement to evolve. Fortify Rights seeks to promote better cooperation in the human rights movement by combining three areas that have been traditionally kept separate: independent investigations, engaging people with power, and providing technical support for community-based initiatives. We strengthen grassroots human rights movements through training and technical support, facilitating access to people in power, and creating space for activists to do their work safely. We independently document and expose violations. And together we press for change. We aim to be the first global human rights monitor committed to building the power of affected communities.

Human rights are declining in Southeast Asia, especially in the age of COVID-19. For 15 years, I’ve worked on the frontlines of genocide, war crimes, and other severe violations in the region. Today, there are more than 2 million refugees, hundreds of thousands internally displaced persons, and millions of at-risk migrants in Southeast Asia. Ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTI, women and children are also under threat. Governments routinely use the law, or “rule by law,” to violate the rights of activists and truth-tellers, and a lack of political will internationally has enabled mass atrocity crimes, including genocide and war crimes. Millions are affected. The good news is that the number of human rights defenders in the region has increased dramatically in the last decade, and the international human rights movement can do much more to support them. The international human rights movement has historically done indispensable work, but all too often, local human rights defenders don’t have a seat at the table. Our innovative theory of change will change that. Our approach is scalable and will promote better cooperation between local human rights leaders and the international human rights movement—in turn, ending violations and creating sustainable change for those affected.

Fortify Rights shifts the landscape of the international human rights movement, building the power and credibility of affected communities while redoubling efforts to investigate and document abuses that would otherwise fester in the shadows of impunity. To bring laws, policies, and practices in line with human rights standards, we combine three commonly separated areas of the international human rights movement. We:

·      Investigate: We conduct in-depth, independent investigations on human rights violations and produce detailed, compelling, high-impact materials, including public and private reports, statements, briefings, op-eds, and films that provide rights-based analysis and concrete, realistic solutions.

·      Engage: We strategically engage senior government officials, high-level UN representatives, members of the international community, and the media with our evidence-based research.

·      Strengthen: We support grassroots human rights defenders and affected communities by providing action-oriented training and workshops, direct support on partner-led outputs, and through convening and networking opportunities. We ensure the least advantaged have direct access to the most advantaged by providing the former with direct access to power and news media. We also provide community-based human rights defenders with tailored support to ensure physical security, mental health, and wellness.

We are a team of human rights defenders, and we stand with survivors of human rights violations, truth-tellers, and advocates in Southeast Asia and beyond. We’re working with survivors of genocide and war, ethnic and religious minorities, people on the move, including survivors of human trafficking, refugees, and migrants, and local human rights defenders who face persecution for their work. Whether we are investigating a massacre or supporting a survivor to brief the White House, trust is vital. Our team develops meaningful, lasting relationships with our partners and the communities where we work. We seek to understand our partners’ objectives, and then we use our resources to support them in achieving their goals, setting us apart from traditional international human rights organizations. 

In turn, we supplement our support for community-based responses with independent investigations. Our revelatory investigations are essential, given the decline in investigative journalism and the rise of “fake news,” and they also contribute to local trust-building, amplifying local voices. Our investigations also differ markedly from antiquated models, in which outside human rights monitors parachute in, document violations, and quickly depart. By design, the majority of our team comes from the communities where we work. No parachutes.

We routinely reach tens of millions of people. In 2018, with less than a dozen team members, our work was mentioned more than 3,200 times in mainstream media outlets. This was by design. We had discovered a positive correlation between our mainstream media mentions and access to people in power: the more media mentions, the more access we had to the halls of power. So we developed an aggressive media strategy for us and our partners. The Elevate Prize will enable us build further awareness and, in turn, end and remedy human rights violations.

In my first nine years of working in Asia, while on research trips to war-torn ethnic areas and other complex environments, I received repeated requests from local communities for documentation training. While working with an international human rights organization, I began to conduct un-mandated trainings, and it was during these trips, and in reflecting on the state of the international human rights movement, that I realized traditional human rights monitoring could evolve to be more productive. There is a divide between international and community-based activists that only serves human rights abusers. 

Based on my experience training activists in Asia and documenting abuses in Myanmar, Thailand, China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and elsewhere, I co-founded Fortify Rights–a human rights organization that incorporates technical support in our mandate. 

The idea began in 2011 in discussions with my colleagues Steve and Oddny Gumaer, founders of Partners Relief & Development, and my wife Amy Smith, Executive Director and co-founder of Fortify Rights. Back then, I was confident there was a global need for our innovative approach. Now I’m convinced. We’ve made real impacts through our theory of change. And the feedback we've received from donors, colleagues, and communities over the past years only confirms this.

After working as a community organizer in New York City, and then with Kerry Kennedy, President of RFK Human Rights, I moved to Southeast Asia to help end corporate complicity in human rights violations in Myanmar. I planned to stay for two years—that was 2005! I’ve since lived in Asia for 15 years. Relationships and the potential for making real impacts keeps me in the region. 

I have seen dark problems up close and personal. I’ve located and exposed mass graves, seen landmines steal limbs in the remote reaches of ethnic war zones, and witnessed how abuses can grind and devastate families and communities. This work is important to me, and I’m committed to solutions. I’ve worked with grassroots activists and engaged governments, former heads of state, senior UN officials, non-state armies, and even human traffickers. I’ve partnered closely with human rights defenders from 11 Asian countries and traveled the region extensively, seeing firsthand what is needed to strengthen the human rights movement. Most importantly, I’ve seen positive impacts and I know a better world is possible.

Before Fortify Rights, I worked with Human Rights Watch and EarthRights International in Asia; Kerry Kennedy in New York; as a community organizer in Harlem; and as an emergency social worker in Alabama. I attended graduate school at Columbia University, and before that, was educated by Jesuits.

I've worked with international legal teams prosecuting genocide and community-based groups documenting abuses in real-time. I’ve joined television talk shows, prime-time news broadcasts, and trained community-based activists to get their work in the news. I’ve advocated at the White House on three occasions under two administrations, testified before US Congress multiple times, and I regularly communicate with people from the grassroots to global levels. I’ve been fortunate to build meaningful relationships with key donors and friends from Hollywood to Bangkok. 

But the theory behind strengthening the human rights movement is more significant than my skills and experience. Our team at Fortify Rights is brilliant, kind, funny, and endlessly compassionate.

We went from one staff and no budget in 2013 to 19 full-time team members and a budget of more than 1.2 million USD in 2020. Under the expert day-to-day internal management of Amy Smith, and due to the hard work of our diverse team (which is mostly women!), our team is as efficient as ever. This is a group effort. And we’re just beginning!

Human rights work almost killed me, but not for the reasons one might expect. For years, on a daily basis, my mind would spontaneously revisit certain scenes I had experienced, like when I first saw someone’s lower leg blown off by a landmine in Kachin State in 2011. Or seeing smoking ash heaps of a Muslim neighborhood burned to the ground in 2012. Or bloodied survivors of mass rape emerging from the Myanmar border in 2017. Over time, I started to display classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had night terrors and poor sleep, mood swings, disconnection from time, and even thoughts of suicide.  

I started to educate myself about PTSD and sought therapy. I did traditional cognitive therapy, and while it was helpful, it never really lessened the symptoms that were plaguing me. Then I discovered an innovative treatment called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. 

After just two sessions of EMDR, my night terrors stopped, my mood swings subsided, and I started to feel more in control.

The human rights movement has failed to protect the mental health of its own. Changing that is now a crucial part of our strategy.

When I co-founded Fortify Rights in 2013, I obtained a cache of leaked Myanmar government documents that provided evidence of serious international crimes against Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya are widely reviled in Myanmar, and many people told me that the first publication of Fortify Rights should not focus on Rohingya, lest we “alienate” ourselves. “No one will want to work with you in Myanmar,” we were told. But we couldn’t suppress the truth. Our first report exposed those policies and made international news, receiving more than one million online file requests in a matter of weeks. And we still subsequently partnered with communities throughout Myanmar.

Later, we began to see the indicators of genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. I was documenting massacres and seeing rising hate speech and draconian restrictions on movement, education, and even childbirth. In 2015, we partnered with a team from Yale Law School to provide the first-ever legal analysis of the Rohingya genocide. We were repeatedly told to avoid the term “genocide” because “it’s too politically loaded.” We pressed on, published, and recommended an independent UN investigation. Two years later, and with considerable work from many, the UN Human Rights Council established such an investigation.

In the arch of history, the human rights movement is exceedingly young, and in many ways, it’s stuck in time. There are needless divisions between local and international human rights organizations in terms of access to power and resources, and today’s international human rights organizations are not mandated to invest deeply in local human rights defenders. Fortify Rights is different. We are fortifying the human rights movement by strengthening the work of local human rights defenders. We investigate and expose human rights violations happening today while strengthening community-based responses to create the human rights leaders of tomorrow. 

Several international organizations expose abuses and conduct advocacy in traditional ways, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Others train local organizations in human rights. We combine both to maximize impact.

Moreover, some community-based organizations conduct human rights documentation as well as training; however, they face capacity limitations, domestic politics, and repressive home governments. As an independent international organization, we aren’t susceptible to these same constraints.

Our approach can elevate the human rights movement. We’re breaking down walls that separate local and global, training and monitoring.

Fortify Rights aims to end and remedy human rights violations by bringing laws, policies, and practices in line with international human rights standards. Our theory of change combines three approaches that we describe in three words: investigate, engage, and strengthen. When these approaches are applied together, we make impacts. We’re supporting the human rights leaders of tomorrow while putting effective pressure on the human rights abusers of today. 

Shining a spotlight on violations that are substantiated with hard evidence will make it more difficult for governments to commit abuses with impunity. By independently documenting abuses while strengthening the ability of communities to do the same, we produce bodies of evidence that can be used as foundations for concrete, realistic solutions. With our evidence-based research, findings, and recommendations, we join with survivors to engage people in positions of power, including senior government officials, prosecutors, high-level UN representatives, and businesses to increase awareness, influence policy decisions, and shape discourse on priority human rights issues. Simultaneously, we dedicate resources to build the leadership of human rights defenders and affected communities by providing tailored technical support, amplifying their voices, and ensuring protective space for them to carry out their work effectively. 

By ensuring local human rights defenders and communities have a seat at the table on issues affecting them, we move the needle toward solutions and accountability for human rights violations.  

Part of our plan is also to affect the way other human rights organizations do their work. Over time, we believe the world’s leading international human rights organizations will adjust their mandates to cooperate more closely with survivors and local human rights defenders. This will have immeasurably positive effects.

Our work has changed policies, laws, and practices, potentially directly affecting the situation of more than 1.2 million refugees, hundreds of thousands internally displaced persons, and millions of at-risk migrants in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. In the past year, we directly supported more than one hundred human rights defenders and community leaders with tools to defend human rights and develop effective strategies to end abuses, planting seeds for Asia’s next human rights leaders.

By 2025, we intend to complete the pilot phase of developing a complete Southeast Asia team. This will provide a feasible plan for scaling beyond Southeast Asia, heeding lessons learned from the pilot process. An accurate number of people who will benefit from the project will depend on numerous variables as well as the social, political, and economic situation in the region. Still, given the trends we are seeing, it is estimated that the region will soon have no less than 10 million people on the move and several million survivors of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

In the next five years, we plan to scale our impacts and operations to the rest of Southeast Asia. Our specific objectives relate to four areas: accountability for mass atrocity crimes; increased protections for people on the move, including refugees, migrants, and survivors of human trafficking; increased protection for human rights defenders; and justice and accountability for minorities.  

Year-by-year, our local partners will be increasingly viewed as credible sources of human rights information, thereby strengthening their community-based responses.

For community-based human rights defenders, we will provide customized training and workshops, support in advocacy and report writing, and building bridges to journalists, advocacy targets, and other organizations.

On top of this, we will continue to conduct independent investigations to expose violations through reports, news releases, op-eds, and films.   

Together with community-based human rights defenders, we will engage the news media, governments, and people with power to advance realistic, measurable solutions.

In growing our operations first within this region, we will rely on two-person country-based teams of Human Rights Specialists, in addition to our growing Core Team. By 2025, we’ll have a self-supporting “pod” within Southeast Asia. The pod will include the Country-Based Teams and Core Team that provides regional-level technical support as well as overall support to the pod. The teams will receive guidance and advisory support from a Regional Director and Operations Director.

Our primary internal obstacle is securing committed funding from donors. COVID-19 will likely impact the long-term financing prospects of human rights as we are beginning to see donors recalibrating their funding allocations. Some donors have re-allocated funding to purely health-based responses, failing to recognize the profound and severe human rights problems posed by the pandemic. Project-specific funding, while always welcomed, can also be a barrier to success. We find that we can be much more effective with support from trust-based philanthropy and unrestricted funding.

Our most considerable and enduring external obstacles, apart from COVID-19, include abusive governments that sometimes target us, impunity for crimes, and the sometimes placating “international community.” Many people in positions of power are put off by human rights organizations because they regard them as confrontational. Moreover, many erroneously believe that human rights are in conflict with economic or political development. For example, officials have suggested to us that accountability for genocide in Myanmar could have adverse political effects, and they lean on this argument to avoid justice. There is no evidence to support such claims; on the contrary, quantitative studies indicate court trials for mass atrocities lead to fewer human rights violations, which in turn would aid sustainable economic development.

To change views about human rights and the human rights movement, we will tell positive stories. The human rights movement has failed to tell positive stories. Activists fear, either consciously or subconsciously, that telling positive stories about human rights would drive attention away from the violations. The result is a movement that comes across as “doom and gloom,” which in turn leads people in power to develop erroneous views about the real power of human rights. Fortify Rights will increasingly tell more and more positive stories in both films and print, and we’ll ensure they’re in multiple relevant languages, reaching people in power as well as the general public. 

In terms of security, we’ll take systematic precautions to ensure the safety of our team and partners. We use state-of-the-art encryption technologies to protect sensitive communications and store information in a secure file-sharing system that can be remotely removed from devices. With the right support, we will be able to upgrade or elevate our approach to these challenges annually. We also integrate other security considerations and assessments into every area of our work, team discussions, and team planning to mitigate risks and prepare for potential reprisals. We already provide internal skill-based training and team members report weekly to experienced advisors to review implementation plans, potential risks and challenges, and response mechanisms to mitigate risks and challenges. With threats and reprisals increasing, especially during the age of COVID-19, we will ramp up these efforts.

Fortify Rights currently works with networks of dozens of partners in Asia and globally. In Myanmar, we work closely with several organizations led and directed by Rohingya, Rakhine/Arakanese, Kachin, Shan, Chin, Burman, and Burmese Muslims. In Thailand, Bangladesh, and Malaysia, we work with several refugee-led organizations as well as other local and national-level organizations. We’ve also partnered with the National Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (SUHAKAM) in an ongoing project to end human trafficking, and we likewise partner with members of the Thai National Human Rights Commission. 

Internationally, we work closely with Human Rights Watch, RFK Human Rights,  Amnesty International, Article 19, Forum Asia, Global Witness, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, and others. We also work with academic institutions, including the Lowenstein human rights clinic at Yale Law School and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. Many of these partnerships have been formal and included several outputs, including reports and films that made international headlines. Senior staff of HRW, RFK Human Rights, and the director of the Harvard Law Clinic are on our international advisory board.

Our team of Human Rights Specialists employs a “people centered” approach, partnering closely with local responders and individuals and communities facing persecution. 

Every human rights defender needs support, including me. In terms of our “strengthening” work, we tailor our technical support to the expressed needs and objectives of our partners. This often comes in the form of action-oriented training and workshops, private convenings, or facilitating access to people in power. At the same time, we work to improve the overall environment in which human rights defenders operate. In some cases, we implement urgent security measures to protect human rights defenders facing persecution. In other instances, we engage governments to apply pressure or provide protection on specific cases.

We also serve as human rights publicists, helping to amplify the work of our local partners. We do this by systematically connecting journalists, filmmakers, and others with community-based activists and members of affected communities.

In terms of our independent investigations, we have become known for accurate, revelatory, and timely human rights reporting. We produce full-length human rights reports with cutting-edge legal analysis, op-eds, news releases, and films. These products have become especially important given the shifting landscape of news media, in which there is less investigative reporting due to shrinking newsrooms. Governments and policymakers have told us they rely on our publications to shape policy, including efforts to hold perpetrators accountable, and UN member states have used our reports to pass resolutions that have objectively “moved the needle” in the right direction.

Fortify Rights is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization registered in the United States and Switzerland. We rely on a variety of sources for funding, including philanthropic foundations, bilateral donors, and private donations. At present, we have 10 institutional donors supporting us, with funds from family foundations making up a significant portion of our funding. The grant periods of our contracts vary, and many of our donors have provided multi-year, sustained support beyond a single contract period. We also have a small portfolio of private donors, including a network of people in the entertainment industry in Hollywood, which has enormous potential to grow. We’ve only ever had one private fundraiser—in 2019 at the home of friends in Los Angeles—and it was a success. We recently hired a Gifts Associate who will drive donor stewardship and cultivation to expand our income from gifts. By the end of this year, we’ll have a tailored media and marketing campaign to target potential donors, build a fanbase for our innovative model, and inspire giving for human rights causes.

Our current donors include The Foundation for Just Society, the Fund for Global Human Rights, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Oak Foundation, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Doha Debates, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. Some foundations request anonymity. Please contact Fortify Rights privately for more detailed information.

We are seeking funds to support our growth. As mentioned above, we currently have 10 institutional donors supporting us, and the grant periods of our contracts vary. To minimize financial risk, we aim to diversify our funding base so that no one single donor occupies more than 25% of our organizational budget. To ensure economic sustainability and to grow unrestricted funds, we’ll invest our time and efforts to expand our income from gifts in the medium and long term. We hope that The Elevate Prize can provide us with the resources to receive professional management and development services, mentorship, and coaching that would help grow our private fundraising portfolio to scale our work. We have extensive networks we haven’t tapped.

Our expected budget for 2020 is USD $1.3 million.