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Between 1989 and 2023, more than 350 advocates from nearly 100 countries have attended the program. HRAP participants have ranged from early-career advocates who cut their teeth in very urgent human rights situations to mid-career advocates who have founded organizations. HRAP alumni have served as UN special rapporteurs, in the ministries of their governments, and at leading human rights organizations around the globe. They have been recognized with honors including the Rafto Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, the highest acknowledgment from the international human rights community.
Below are the biographies of current Advocates and descriptions by select alumni as to why they became human rights advocates.
To see a list of additional past Advocates click here.
To read about more about the work of our Advocates click here .
Nigeria, 2011
Assistant Professor, Peace Studies and International Development EDI Facilitator, School of Social Sciences; Director, BA in International Relations, Politics and Security Studies, University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies and International Development (PSID)
Colins Imoh has worked in various youth-based organizations and was involved in the setting up of the Africa Network of Young Peace Builders (ANYP). He was the Africa Desk Coordinator working at the International Secretariat of the UNOY in the Netherlands. The ANYP is a continental initiative that joins the efforts of young people in over 40 African countries for the purposes of building peace and actively collaborating in the search for the non-violent resolution of conflicts.
Imoh obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Toledo, USA, exploring the application of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen in conflict prevention. An MA in Conflict Transformation and Organizational Leadership from Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, USA and an MPhil in Environmental Management and Sustainability from the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a graduate certificate in Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, Boston, USA. He was the pioneer coordinator of the Africa Network of Young Peace Builders, a strong network of about 200 youth-based organizations and individuals involved in Peacebuilding, human rights and good governance working from the UNOY Peacebuilders Foundation International Secretariat in the Netherlands. He served as the Partners for Peace (P4P) Project Manager, a network whose mission is to build social capital around peacebuilding. P4P is an initiative of Chevron Inc, USA. Before working as P4P Manager, he was the Director of the Centre for Social Transformation and Human Development (CHDST). He coordinated various peace & civic education programs in the communities, including the weekly live Radio program on democracy, good governance, human rights, peace, and development. He is an Advisory Board Member of the International Institute for Peace Education (IIPE); a Board of Experts of the One Humanity Institute; an International Steering Committee Member and Secretary of the African Peace Fellows Board of California State University, Sacramento, and a Member of the International Consultancy Panel of the Mediators Beyond Borders; among others. He is on the editorial board of In Factis Pax Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice. He has written articles and book chapters in his areas of interest.
Imoh long-term goal is to establish a center in the Niger Delta, which will be involved in training, research, and advocacy in the areas of environmental and conflict management.
Program Manager, AIDS Alliance in Nigeria
“To ask me why I am doing human rights,” Abu Tunde Irunukhar says, “is to ask me why I am being human. Human rights is about being human.” Tunde came to understand human rights while working with the HIV/AIDS community in Nigeria, where persons living with HIV/AIDS are not only stigmatized and rejected from society, but are seen as less than human on account of their HIV status. He began challenging this view by mobilizing communities and raising awareness about HIV and by strengthening the capacity of persons living with and affected by HIV/AIDS to obtain their rights. “When you provide rights,” he explains, “you make people live life to the fullest.”
For Tunde, human rights advocacy started during a year of service during which he provided basic items to orphaned babies and prison inmates. He recalls, “Through reaching out to these communities, I was reaching out to humanity and bringing excitement and joy from just basic items.” Tunde involved himself in advocacy by joining AIDS Alliance in Nigeria in 2003. When some of the people he worked with died during treatment for the disease, the importance of human rights became even clearer for him. “Only people with an awareness of rights can assert themselves to procure treatments and come back to life in the community,” he says. Tunde has since used human rights to demand services and care and push for access to a comprehensive continuum of care, accountability and transparency in the utilization of HIV/AIDS funds; greater involvement of people living with HIV; and workplace policies for those infected by HIV/AIDS.
In his own life, meanwhile, human rights has offered him a whole new outlook to living. “I think holistically,” he says. “because human rights come in bunches—you can’t talk about one right without other rights.”
