Give the Rule of Law this Giving Tuesday

Dear Rule of Law Friend,

I am writing today to ask you to join the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) in supporting legal reform and legal advocacy throughout the world to make human rights real, “close to home,” as Eleanor Roosevelt said, where it matters for citizens in their everyday lives.

• Your contribution to ABA ROLI can help support Turkish lawyers to provide critical legal information to the more than 3 million refugees who have fled Syria for Turkey, showing them the way to realizing their rights to housing, employment, health care, and education for their children.
• Your contribution to ABA ROLI can help support our work in Mali to combat descent-based slavery, which shockingly still affects hundreds of thousands of citizens in West Africa today. Advocacy by ABA ROLI partners in Mali has freed 40 citizens from bondage and is advancing an important new law criminalizing slavery.
• Through ABA ROLI’s program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, your support can help end discrimination and injustice against persons with disabilities, such as Isabelle a deaf woman and a survivor of rape whose rapist burned her child alive and still escaped justice.
• And your contribution can help fight hate crimes against LGBTI people throughout the world.

These are just a few examples of the many ways in which your contribution to ABA ROLI can help sustain human rights and the rule of law.

Unfortunately, we do this work in an increasingly challenging environment for the rule of law. Throughout the world, many of our civil society partners face laws and regulations designed by authoritarian regimes to curtail rule of law advocacy. Others face harassment, threats on their lives, violence, and arrest.

At the same time that these partners need our solidarity more than ever, our traditional donors are turning away from the cause, cutting development budgets and prioritizing hard power over values-driven global leadership. For this reason, support for ABA ROLI is more important now than ever. When funding was recently cut for our program assisting Syrian refugees in Turkey, we could only sustain the effort through the generous support of donors like you. 

This giving season, we hope you will remember ABA ROLI and our legal colleagues around the world working to uphold human rights close to home.

Thank you for your support and for your steadfast commitment to the rule of law.

Elizabeth Andersen 

Director, ABA Rule of Law Initiative