These last two years have been particularly difficult worldwide. While some people lost their loved ones, others lost their jobs or felt the burden of working from home, not traveling, and lacking social interactions. All of this has had a tremendous impact on mental health, to different degrees, but also on the way people have organized their lives and time.

In the same way as the lives of our contributors have changed, so did ours. This has led to a reduction in the publication volume, which we intend to augment in the coming months, and to internal restructuring.

Over the past year, Elettra Repetto took over as Editor-in-chief and we bid a fond farewell to Marcus Erridge, our former Editor-in-chief, Simon Levett, and Meredith Veit, but we also welcomed Ana Regedor, a lawyer and a researcher from Portugal, whose own articles you will soon read.

Still, during the year at Rights! we published several articles from our board members:

Luca Bonadiman opened the year with his Changing Paradigms, from Victimhood to Solidarity, Elettra Repetto penned two articles, Egypt’s War against Researchers and Forty Years Later, A red ribbon for prevention against discrimination, and Michael Merrigan wrote an important commentary on ECtHR’s ruling on Mahi v. Belgium, the European Court of Human Rights once again stresses individual duties and responsibilities.

We also welcomed some interesting pieces on femicide, Reflecting on the Black and White Campaign in Turkey and the Country’s Long Overlooked Problem of Femicide, on the dangers activists face in the Philippines, Uprooting the Safety of Activists and Dissenters: The Dangers of the Anti-Terror Act and the Termination of the UP-DND Accord in the Philippines, but also on refugees and displaced people, Uprooted, yet undeterred, and on police violence, Re-Envisioning Police Training in the United States: Fostering Education and Collaboration to Adapt Police Responses to Civilians with Disabilities and Mental Illness. Despite publishing fewer articles than last year, we kept our publications diverse in terms of topics covered and geographical provenance, publishing pieces from Turkey to Colombia, from the Philippines to the US.

As for the formats used, we decided to go back to a simple “fit-for-all” submission type, but we kept the New Publication series format introduced in 2020. We ask human rights writers to complete a short Q&A, discussing the main points of their essay or manuscript. Authors can contact us and find further information here.

We are also interested in publishing more multimedia pieces, for example, in May 2021 we published a Q&A with Writer, Theatre Director and Filmmaker Mary Moynihan in our Watch / Listen section which includes In Time, a poem film by Mary Moynihan.

In this time of crisis, global unrest, hatred, fear, lack of confidence in media sources and institutions, our mission at Rights! is to keep talking about human rights in an independent, accessible, and egalitarian way. To achieve our goal, include more pieces, and allow for more diversity, we have realized we need our team to grow and this is why we published a call for new editors and contributors. We are looking forward to welcoming new editors to help us improve our work, to challenge us, and increase the submissions we can review and publish, as well as our readership. Those of you who feel they might be interested in joining a young, enthusiastic team reading and writing about human rights, please feel free to send us your CV at RightsBlog@protonmail.com.

We are also looking forward to new submissions, comments, ideas. If you are interested in publishing with us, please send us your ideas and pieces at: RightsBlog@protonmail.com. You can find the submission guidelines here. We welcome think pieces, comments from the field, case studies, interviews, book reviews, critiques, and new ideas from established and emerging human rights professionals and scholars, from students to professors from all over the world. Moreover, we are proud to publish content that will always be free and shared under Creative Commons licensing.

Thank you to all those who read, shared, and contributed to our growing human rights and democratisation platform in 2021.

We wish you a terrific 2022!

Elettra Repetto

Editor-in-chief, Rights!

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