The Turkish Medical Association held a series of meetings to design a human rights curriculum for all medical schools in the country. The curriculum would cover roles and responsibilities of health care professionals, as well as targeted practical training for issues relevant in the country. The TMA also hosted a series of training conferences for practicing forensic physicians. In addition to imparting forensic skills on identifying torture, they also reinforced the ethical and legal obligations these professionals had to victims.

Nitartha International identifies Tibet’s most critical and endangered educational texts in need of preservation while directly supporting educational systems to share these documents. Scholars are trained in reading and interpreting the texts while at the same time entering them into an electronic database.

Florida Rural Legal Services collaborates with local library systems in four rural counties to create a convenient delivery system for legal aid and community information to low-income people. A combination of video cameras, scanners, printers and Internet connections enable an individual to consult with a legal advocate as easily as if the visit were in the lawyer’s office. The equipment can be controlled remotely by the attorney or paralegal, so the individual does not need to understand the technology. Documents can be exchanged, so both parties are viewing the same information.

At the beginning of 2005, Enfants & Developpement (E&D) in Cambodia set up a Participatory Child Protection Project with communal councils covering 126 villages. The project piloted a new initiative to intervene in child abuse and combat child trafficking issues through the establishment of Child Boards at the district level. At the time of this writing, it was too early to assess the impacts of the project, however, a high degree of success towards the goal of protecting children from being abused was anticipated due to variety of reasons. These include:

African Public Radio (APR) used its power as a media entity to influence individuals and groups who could help fix the situation in Burundi’s hospitals, where poor people were being held against their will because they could not pay their bills. Eventually, in partnership with local NGOs, APR successfully pressured the government to order the people’s release.

Senior sex workers play an important role in the sex trade. Most are madams or rent rooms to prostitutes who stay in the brothel. They have more spare time than younger workers and they also have a deeper knowledge of the industry. Their position of economic power within the brothels offers these senior sex workers a unique ability to influence who can be in the brothels and when they rent quarters to younger prostitutes they clarify that no under­age girls are allowed.

In Uganda, the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) trains local leaders to help community members with legal complaints in a way that avoids the problems and frustrations of using the formal judicial system. FHRI teaches these leaders how to educate their communities about their constitutional and human rights. It also gives them paralegal skills, enabling them to provide mediation, counseling and advice so that citizens can obtain re­dress for abuses and exercise their full human rights.

Since its creation in 1984, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) has addressed the issue of land reform by organizing large groups of landless farmers to settle and farm unused land belonging to wealthy landowners. After occupying an area MST attempts to gain the land legally through petitioning and legislation, using an article in the Brazilian constitution stating that unproductive land is available for agrarian reform.

The South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS) organizes raids and rescue operations to liberate child laborers. SACCS is a conglomeration of more than 750 civil society and human rights groups throughout South Asia that aim to eradi­cate bonded and child labor.

Using a constitutional provision that had never been invoked, Comisión Nacional Pro-Referéndum (CNR) orga­nized a referendum in Uruguay, so that the public could vote on the congressional decision to grant impunity to human rights abusers employed by the military. In order to petition the government to hold a popular referendum, CNR needed, within one year of the impunity law’s passage, to collect the signatures of 25 percent of citizens who were qualified to vote.