The UN Declaration on human rights defenders was designed to promote and protect the rights of individuals engaged in the defence of human rights. Generating awareness of the Declaration remains a challenge. In Uganda, efforts to develop knowledge and awareness at the community level had been noticeably absent, but a recent initiative by the Human Rights Centre Uganda (HRCU) has sought to bridge the divide between the international and community spheres. This policy and practice note will seek to discuss a participatory simplification and translation exercise carried out in six linguistic regions of Uganda. It will outline the thinking behind the high degree of community involvement in the translation process by linking language to identity and culture. It will offer a detailed explanation of the process itself, in order to generate a strong sense of how it played out in reality, before moving on to suggest some of the expected results and acknowledge some of the challenges encountered during implementation. The paper will suggest that the model adopted should serve as an example of how to deliver a translation process that is both relevant and interactive. By taking a community approach, greater awareness of the values inherent in the Declaration are developed and this, combined with a greater sense of ownership of the document, provides human rights defenders in Uganda with some of the tools required to continue to advocate for socio-economic and political change, using a rights-based approach.
