BIHR is a charity, we therefore do not have powers to enforce human rights; we do however, fulfil an important role in challenging public bodies and services to be more rights-respecting and providing the support to help make this happen.

Our change through human rights approach influences both the way staff make decisions about individual people and the way organisations are run, from policy and strategy right through to organisational culture. This is a vital part of the work to achieve a culture of respect for human rights in the UK. Our activities include:

• mapping key challenges to human rights standards,
• supporting co-production with people receiving services/support, wider community groups and staff
• tailoring human rights learning and development support,
• focusing on skills and confidence-building,
• actional planning and putting change processes and practices in place,
• co-developing resources and tools to sustain change through human rights, and
• peer mentoring and networking

The human rights issues we work on with community and voluntary groups reach across the range of areas, including safeguarding, commissioning, health, care, social work, co-production, and much more. Find out more here.

Our 2020-2025 Strategic Framework has the following objectives for our work with public bodies and services, which we will be focusing on over the five years:

• Working with public authorities to develop human rights approaches to better uphold people’s human rights. Public bodies include traditional local and national authorities (councils, NHS, social work teams, etc.) and voluntary groups, not-for-profits and others delivering public services.
• Working with decision-makers to integrate human rights into processes and policies that impact on people’s experiences of public services, including commissioners, regulators and other monitoring bodies. This includes using our Traffic Light Assessment system, benchmark their progress against the human rights approach PANEL principles, using a red, amber, green rating, and providing recommendations for improvement and development.

The human rights issues we work on with public bodies and services reach across the range of sector activities, including safeguarding, commissioning, health, care, social work, co-production, and much more. Find out more here.

Find out more about our current activities:

         

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Find out more about the current issues we're working on:

  

Find out more about out work with people, communities, and policy work: