State-Level Interventions for Human Trafficking: The Advocates for Human Rights

Abstract

The Advocates for Human Rights works to end human trafficking with a human rights framework using research, documentation, and advocacy both locally and internationally. The Advocates’ decades of experience working to end violence against women and to protect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers underpins its anti-trafficking work. The Advocates partners with nongovernmental organizations, pro bono practitioners, university researchers, and government agencies to build practical approaches based on human rights principles. These strategies center on the needs of victims while ensuring accountability for those who violate the human rights of people directly affected by trafficking.

The Advocates for Human Rights was founded in 1983 by a group of Minnesota lawyers who recognized the community’s spirit of social justice as an opportunity to promote and protect human rights in the United States and around the world. Today The Advocates has produced more than 75 reports on a wide range of issues documenting human rights practices and offering policy recommendations. The Advocates works with partners overseas and in the United States to restore and protect human rights and holds Special Consultative Status with the United Nations.

For more than a decade, The Advocates has used a human rights approach to identify gaps in legal protections relating to human trafficking, engage stakeholders to identify sound strategies, and work with policymakers to implement change. The Advocates researches the laws and documents and analyzes the experiences and opinions of stakeholders, including people in government, NGOs, and those with lived experience. The organization develops and evaluates its policy proposals to ensure health, safety, dignity, and justice for those affected by the laws. This analysis necessarily entails balancing the rights of all stakeholders. The human rights approach helps avoid the polarizing ideological positions which plague the anti-trafficking discourse by focusing on the actual impact identified by people directly affected by public policies relating to trafficking, prostitution, immigration, and other related issues.

Today Minnesota has a robust, diverse, and engaged community working to prevent and respond to human trafficking and is representative of a good intersectional practice example of the fourth “P”: partnership working.