"As societies build walls of separation between communities,
ICAAD works to remove each brick to illuminate our common humanity"
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Building multidisciplinary partnerships & strategies to combat structural discrimination globally

Programs

We believe that women & girls can reach their full potential when systems are designed to include their experiences and voices, and existing patriarchal systems are disabled. Our programs expand access to justice and human rights education by using evidence-based solutions that are institutionalized in local communities affecting millions of women & girls.
We believe that the identity of marginalized communities must be safeguarded. This happens when their ethnic, national, religious, linguistic, political, or cultural backgrounds are not seen as antithetical to the State, but rather, as a driving force towards creating a pluralistic society. Ensuring equal dignity for minorities helps to ensure just and equitable systems.
The U.N. Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism is central to how we monitor discrimination globally because of its universal coverage of human rights issues and ability to track States who have explicitly agreed to address human rights gaps by reforming their domestic policy. We train law students and civil society on law as an invaluable advocacy tool.

 

Featured Media

Handbook puts gender bias on the spot

Lawyers and local advocacy organisations will gain access to an important tool needed to identify gender bias within legal decisions ... Read More
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Sexual Harassment Train the Trainers Workshop

ICAAD in partnership with The Fiji Women's Rights Movement (FWRM) organised the first ever train the trainers workshop to raise ... Read More
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Addressing Racism in VR + Donor Spotlight

Dear friend of ICAAD, This season, we are grateful that ICAAD has grown to be a vibrant community of people ... Read More
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Demanding Access to Vital Services in Delhi

In December 2016, Nazdeek and ICAAD launched the SMS for Justice program in Delhi to track access to vital services ... Read More
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Global Pro Bono Report: Accessing Justice – 3 Year Anniversary Review

The Global Pro Bono Report shows the breadth and depth of ICAAD's ability to leverage multidisciplinary partnerships to catalyze social ... Read More
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Serving Vulnerable Communities Globally: Introduction to ICAAD

Vision: As societies build walls of separation between communities, ICAAD works to remove each brick to illuminate our common humanity ... Read More
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#RaiseYourShield

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

7 hours ago

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

This NYTimes article on racism in the field of math is good, but doesn't emphasize enough how racism and bias affect evaluation of work or mentorship given, affecting progress at every turn.

Let us give you a small example from the legal field -- an empirical study found that the EXACT SAME MEMO was graded consistently higher (score of 4.1) and given more positive and constructive feedback when the author was purported to be white versus when the author was black (score of 3.2). (nextions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/written-in-black-and-white-yellow-paper-series.pdf) ... See MoreSee Less

What I Learned While Reporting on the Dearth of Black Mathematicians

nytimes.com

My recent reporting has highlighted why racial exclusion in “the queen of the sciences’’ may matter most of all.
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International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

4 weeks ago

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

This radio show is well worth the listen! "“Equal protection of the laws” was granted to all persons by the 14th Amendment in 1868. But for nearly a century after that, women had a hard time convincing the courts that they should be allowed to be jurors, lawyers, and bartenders, just the same as men. A then-lawyer at the ACLU named Ruth Bader Ginsburg set out to convince an all-male Supreme Court to take sex discrimination seriously with an unconventional strategy. She didn’t just bring cases where women were the victims of discrimination; she also brought cases where men were the victims. In this episode, we look at how a key battle for gender equality was won with frat boys and beer." ... See MoreSee Less

Sex Appeal | More Perfect | WNYC Studios

wnycstudios.org

How a major battle in the struggle for gender equality was won with beer.
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International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

4 weeks ago

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

A well-thought piece on why persecution on the basis of gender should be grounds for asylum...
"Increasingly, going against gender norms is being seen by courts as evidence of a political opinion, but this has the tendency of elevating visible and politically active women's right to asylum over the rights of dis empowered women. A woman fleeing domestic violence by her husband in a country where domestic violence is legal is usually not seen as engaging in politics, even though there is something innately political in refusing to live in a system where you are treated as a non-human. The exclusion of this sort of act from the realm of the political follows centuries of treating women as inherently a-political persons, divorced from the world of political action and reaction. Interestingly, in such cases, it is frequently the perpetrator who is viewed as having a political opinion about women, while the victim is viewed as simply reacting to this opinion, rather than holding an opposing opinion." ... See MoreSee Less

Why Gender Should Be Grounds for Asylum

globalstatelessness.blogspot.com

A blog about statelessness, migration, refugees and climate change.
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International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD shared a link.

4 weeks ago

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

Where survivors of sexual abuse are sued by the perpetrators

edition.cnn.com

In the era of #MeToo, the Austrian skiing community has been rocked by allegations of historical sexual abuse. But some sexual abuse survivors say Austria's stringent defamation laws are holding them back from speaking out.
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International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

1 month ago

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination - ICAAD

This Civil Rights and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’d like to challenge you to reflect on how fear may have influenced your opinions, especially of others, and to take a step towards the courage to overcome those fears. Why the focus on fear you might ask?

Famed marketer and author Simon Sinek in his book “Start with Why” outlines six typical manipulations used in sales and marketing, one of which is the use of fear. On fear, Sinek says, “When fear is being employed, facts are incidental. Deeply seated in our biological drive to survive, that emotion cannot be quickly wiped away with facts and figures.”

In the current political atmosphere, in the U.S. and around the globe, fear is often used by politicians and campaigners to polarize debates and to demonize marginalized communities, using them as scapegoats for the real economic, social, and political challenges that societies face.

Martin Luther King, Jr. understood how important fear is, so much so that he gave a sermon on it named “Antidotes for Fear.” It’s worth reading in its entirety, especially because it recognizes the importance, necessity, and creativity of fear (kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-xiv-mastery-fear-or-antidotes-fear). However, particularly pertinent section was highlighted by King’s wife Coretta Scott King in her book “My life with Martin Luther King, Jr”:

“First Martin spoke of the many kinds of fear that troubled men and women in this period of change and "calamitous uncertainty"— fear of illness or economic disaster, fear of personal inadequacy in our highly competitive society. More terrible was the fear of death, even racial annihilation, in this atomic age, when the whole world teetered on "a balance of terror . . . fearful lest some diplomatic faux pas ignite a frightful holocaust."

"Some fears are normal and necessary," he said, like the fear of snakes in a jungle, but when they become neurotic and unchecked, they paralyze the will and reduce a man to apathy or despair. He quoted Emerson, who wrote, "He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear."

How, then, to overcome fear? First, Martin said, "We must un-flinchingly face our fears . . . this confrontation will, to some measure, grant us power. . . . "Second, we can master fear through one of the supreme virtues known to man— courage . . . courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear.”"

MLK Coretta Scott King Simon Sinek ... See MoreSee Less

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