Submit an Article/Writer's Guidelines

The purpose of the Human Rights News Forum is to provide a means for organizations to express their views and to advance the cause of human rights around the world. We welcome articles on human rights topics. These should be informational, topical and promote the value and importance of human rights or a particular right. They can focus on and describe a situation where a group's rights have been abused, or relate an account of how human rights have been advanced in an area of the world or for a particular group.

This website is intended to feature topical human rights issues. For example, a current story covers a "Human Rights Relief Team" that was dispatched to South Asia to look into reports of orphaned children being exploited by human traffickers. The story covers the purpose of the team and its mandate to produce a report, based on direct observation, that will be presented to humanitarian agencies to help make their work more effective.

The website is a venue for contributions from ANYONE who is working to make human rights a fact. The contributions we are looking for should be newsy, topical and have a human rights theme.

There are many human rights organizations with websites, many of them containing important data about abuses in the world. Human Rights News Forum is not intended to supplant or detract in any way from the extremely important work done by these sites.

Instead, the Human Rights News Forum is intended to serve as an additional site for general human rights information with a specific mandate to seek out and highlight solutions and successes. Obviously, it is vital to bring to light human rights abuses, but we feel it is equally important to trumpet successes when they occur. The publication of information about such successes can encourage similar successes and may help to serve, to borrow a term from the business world, as examples of “best practices.”

Content contributions could include a single article on a topic of interest, a set of articles on related topics or an ongoing series of “from-the-frontlines” reports on an ongoing human rights effort. We would encourage human rights workers to consider writing regular reports covering the work they do and the successes they achieve; in this way the Human Rights News Forum could serve as a way for them to stay connected with constituents and other interested parties.

Article length can vary. Short news items of 300 words may be used for news summaries; longer pieces of 1200 – 1500 words may be featured individually. In depth pieces of more than 1500 words may be broken into a series of articles and published over a period of time. Where possible, supply images with your article. Please provide proof of copyright permission for the images you supply.

Although opinion pieces such as commentaries may find a place on the Human Rights News Forum in the future, we are currently accepting only third person, news items.

The current topics featured on Human Rights News Forum include:

Religious Freedom
Youth Issues
Freedom of Speech
Human Rights Education
Human Rights Relief Actions
Human Trafficking
The HIV/AIDS Pandemic
Human Rights Related Publications
Human Rights Advocate of the Month

Additional topics may be added based on contributor and/or reader feedback.

Short news items may be sent directly to the Human Rights News Forum editor, David Aden at dadenhr@webworldtech.com.

Longer unsolicited articles are also acceptable, although sending a query to the editor first with an outline of the proposed article will increase the chance of publication.

All submissions should include the following:

• Author’s name and email contact information
• Any organizational affiliation
• A one paragraph summary of the article
• A brief resume of yourself
• A statement to the effect that the sender has the right to authorize publication and that publication on the Human Rights News Forum is authorized
• Where applicable, a list of information or sources that could be checked to validate the information provided.

Human Rights News Forum is a volunteer organization and does not currently pay for material. It will, however, provide a by-line and link to a submitting author’s site or email or to an organization’s web site.