Our Work

INTERIGHTS has three main ways of working:

  • Strategic human rights litigation

We provide expertise and support in strategic human rights litigation in priority thematic areas and other issues of particular regional significance, including economic and social rights, equality and security and the rule of law.

The bulk of our litigation is before international and regional human rights bodies where we generally co-represent individual applicants, or act as advisers of record. In selected cases before the European Court of Human Rights, we intervene as a third party, advising the Court on particular international and comparative practice on which it should draw inspiration in its adjudication of cases.

We also advise lawyers before national courts on international and comparative legal standards that might be argued before their domestic courts. Should these cases fail domestically, we then support the local lawyers in taking their cases to international or regional bodies.

We work regionally in Africa, Europe (with a focus on South Eastern, Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including the South Caucasus region) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

We work across the Commonwealth through our publications programme and whilst we previously had a full programme of work in South Asia, currently our engagement is more limited.

  • Building the capacity of lawyers, and judges and other human rights defenders

We run targeted training in human rights law, internships and voluntary placements for lawyers and law students and also work towards building capacity through our collaborative litigation efforts with local partners.

  • Publication of legal information

Access to relevant, accurate legal information is a vital complement to our litigation and training work and we produce and disseminate a range of publications, keeping lawyers, judges and NGOs abreast of developments in human rights law which affect their work. These are both hard copy and online publications.

Our regular subscription publications are the INTERIGHTS Bulletin and the Commonwealth Human Rights Law Digest.

We publish two free email bulletins, the monthly CommonwealthNet and the INTERIGHTS Quarterly Update.

We also maintain two free searchable case databases which host over 2,800 summaries of human rights cases from around the world.