AIMS AND APPROACH

The principal aim of the project is to significantly reduce the incidence of torture and ill treatment in security and law enforcement organisations in Sri Lanka and Nepal. More specifically, our project aims to develop the capacities of personnel within those organisations to prevent and address torture and ill treatment.

Beyond this specific objective, our project seeks to develop a methodology and approach to prevent human rights violations that will supplement the toolkit available to those in the human rights field – an approach that can be adopted and taken up in other countries and thematic areas. By demonstrating the effectiveness of a prevention strategy that goes beyond the specific violation or aberrant behaviour to address the situational root causes of violations, we hope to encourage those interested in human rights protection and promotion to expand their thinking about how to conduct prevention work and their capacities to do so more effectively.

To achieve these aims, we adopted a distinctive approach characterised by four key principles:

1. The action needs to be based on solid in-country empirical evidence, supported by the best international knowledge;
2. It needs to be developed and implemented cooperatively with the security forces and law enforcement agencies that are the target beneficiaries of the project;
3. We need to understand and work with the ways in which personnel within security forces and law enforcement agencies think and how they see their work and human rights;
4. The causes of human rights violations cannot be located uniquely at the level of the individual, but have to be understood in terms of situational factors.