Human Rights monitoring has been the very basis of all kinds of human rights work that People’s Watch has been doing today. People’s Watch has been the trend setter in professionalizing human rights monitoring primarily through scientific fact findings and information collection at source. Fact finding reports form the basis for further action that facilitate the victims enjoy due remedy and justice. Women’s rights will be a new area of concentration as well.

Legal intervention has been the next logical step to monitoring and it has been the expert area of People’s Watch. Interventions are made in the form of moving to the court and or to various commissions to make the state accountable to a particular human rights violation. Interventions are also made at the international level by seeking support and solidarity of different human rights organizations and the human rights instruments and mechanisms of the United Nations are appropriately used to highlight issues.

Taking on from the belief that human rights promotion and protection can no more be an institutional agenda and has to be necessarily a public agenda, People’s Watch has already begun strategizing its interventions by initiating a human rights movement at the grassroots level, called as ‘Citizens for Human Rights Movement (CHRM)”. Gross roots cells being established in hundreds of taluks and villages enable a growing number of individuals actively engaging themselves in human rights monitoring, intervention and awareness building across the state. It is visualized that these cells across the state together will emerge as a movement to protect and promote human rights, with limited institutional support. Individuals across a broad spectrum of society’s political parties, movements, castes, religions, trade unions, civil society groups, human rights defenders and others form these CHRM cells. Grounded in their shared commitment to the values of human rights, these coalitions attract tremendous grass-roots support and form taluk, district and state committees with male and female coordinators to lead. People’s Watch provides appropriate leadership training, organizes workshops and refresher courses for human rights defenders, and supports this Citizens for Human Rights Movement in any way necessary to sustain its ongoing synergy.

Holding hands and accompanying of the victims until they restore their normalcy has been the single point agenda of People’s Watch in establishing rehabilitation homes for the torture victims; one at Madurai and the other at Mettur; both in Tamil Nadu. This was an initiative of our realization during the year 2000 that the victims need multi-dimensional support in sustaining their physical and as well as mental strength both as an individual and as a family in their pursuit of attaining justice. Services ranging from shelter, food, counseling, medical and mental health assistance are some of the services offered by RCTV.

The objective of creating the next generation of human rights practitioners has been progressively moving towards fulfillment mainly through human rights education activities and awareness programs. The pilot program on HR education in schools held in Chennai in the year 1997 paved the way for the expansion of this program in a variety of schools with different backgrounds. In the past ten years, about 1, 84, 565 children from 1879 schools have been reached and about 3132 teachers have been trained for this purpose. The Institute of Human Rights Education has introduced “National Program for Human Rights Education in Schools” in the following 10 states namely, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, West Bengal, Gujarat, Chattisgarh, Kerala, Pondicherry, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tripura.

The aim of the action is to initiate and model a national campaign for the prevention of torture in India, with a deliberate focus on torture practices routinely employed by police. This project covers the following 9 States in India: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Bihar. Two stages drive the action’s overall agenda: first, the formation of ten state-wide networks to monitor instances of torture and intervene on behalf of individual victims; and second, a national awareness campaign that uses this monitoring data to generate public and professional condemnation of torture practices within a wider culture of rights, improve enforcement of and adherence to existing constitutional guarantees, and lobby for CAT ratification and stricter domestic laws in India’s Parliament and the individual state legislative assemblies. The national awareness campaign includes at its core, a series of state-level awareness conferences targeting the various professions implicated in the elimination of torture: lawyers, social activists, doctors, psychiatrists, journalists, and teachers. Police themselves, as well as members of the judiciary, are also treated as intermediaries and given awareness training that address them as constructive partners rather than adversaries in this project.

This project has been a recent but major break through for People’s Watch, given its organizational mandate and the belief that each individual in this organization has. More so, this is the project that has offered the first ever collaboration with the government, for People’s Watch. This is a national level program jointly initiated by the UNDP and the Department of Justice (DoJ), Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India. People’s Watch has been one of the very few NGO partners in this program and has a very specific objective of strengthening access to justice information by creating an interactive website that provides enhanced access to information about various formal justice delivery institutions like the court, prisons, police institutions, legal services authority, legal aid services, hospitals, rehabilitation homes, NGOs offering human rights services etc. Information collected from all the 604 districts in the country will be collated and submitted in a dynamic web based data base to ease and speed up access to justice for the common public, so that the Justice seeking processes are speeded up with immediate online access to simple and reliable information on formal judicial institutions

Through a variety of efforts aimed at enhancing public interest, awareness and outrage around human rights issues, PW has launched an intensive, targeted media campaign to accelerate an active publications and documentation component of its work.

The giant Tsunami waves that struck various parts of South and South East Asia left large-scale destruction in its wake. As the immediate relief work comes to an end and long-term rehabilitation starts, the need for specialized legal intervention was expressed by various stakeholders including the communities. It was in this context that SOCO Trust, People’s Watch and Human Rights Law Network, Chennai came together and initiated an emergency legal intervention with strategic alliance with the State Legal Services Authority around the following principles and objectives. The Principles on which it operates are Emphasis on alternate dispute resolution and avoidance of court-room litigation, Emphasis on legal intervention and not aid and Inclusive approach – with a facilitating space for all possible actors to participate in the development of the model