A Three-Pronged Strategy in the Fight for Human Rights
An Interview with Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights. Fortify Rights works to ensure human rights for all with a team of human rights defenders who believe in the three-pronged strategy of the influence of evidence-based research, the power of strategic truth-telling, and the importance of working with individuals, communities, and movements pushing for change in fighting for human rights. Fortify Rights uses an innovative approach to bring laws, policies, and practices in line with human rights standards. When Fortify Rights investigates human rights violations, engages people with power, and strengthens human rights defenders, change is possible.
Before co-founding Fortify Rights, Matthew Smith previously worked with Human Rights Watch, EarthRights International, Kerry Kennedy of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and as a community organizer and emergencies social worker in the United States. In 2019, he received a Fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he was a 2014 Echoing Green Global Fellow. Matthew's work has exposed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, multi-billion-dollar corruption, and other human rights violations. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, TIME, the Guardian, and other outlets.
Julie Allen: Fortify Rights began operating in 2013 in Myanmar. Can you tell us a bit about the organization’s origin story?
Matthew Smith: My wife Amy and I have lived and worked in Thailand and Myanmar since 2005. Over the years, we worked with many international and community-based organizations pressing for change. International human rights monitors operating in the region were doing indispensable work and still are, but they weren’t mandated to support community-based responses to human rights violations. We saw that as a significant gap that we believed we could fill, so in 2013 we founded Fortify Rights. We piloted a theory of change that would combine three commonly separate elements of the human rights movement: independent human rights investigations, engaging people with power, and strengthening community-based responses to human rights violations. We provide workshops, training, access to opportunities, and other technical support for human rights defenders, many of whom are under attack.
We’re meticulous about monitoring what works and what doesn’t, and our data shows that when we combine these three strategies against a single problem, we’re more likely to achieve strategic impacts. It’s not easy, and there are immense challenges, but we’re comfortably past the proof-of-concept phase, and our team is growing, which is exciting. We’re currently 21 human rights defenders, mostly women, and mostly coming from the four countries where we work — Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. The few of us on our team who aren’t originally from Southeast Asia have lived and worked in the region for decades. I think these demographic details matter and have helped us achieve some success.
One of our newest initiatives involves opening a space in Bangkok called The Fort, where human rights defenders will be able to convene, collaborate, and create change. It will be a human rights incubator of sorts, with public and private events and space for our team and others to work. An international architecture firm designed the space pro bono, and work on it is almost completed. This year, it will open as an independent space led by a prominent Thai human rights defender, who is now gearing up for the role.
Allen: So what is Fortify Rights’ focus in 2022?
Smith: We currently have four broad strategic areas of focus throughout the region, each with detailed objectives and sub-objectives we are working to achieve on any given day. The four areas of focus are ensuring accountability for atrocity crimes, protection for women and minorities, protection for people on the move, and protection for human rights defenders. Unfortunately, there are severe abuses across all four of these areas in Southeast Asia.
Ensuring accountability for atrocity crimes has been a significant focus, especially since the military coup d’état in Myanmar in February 2021. Immediately following the coup, the people of Myanmar took to the streets en masse, rejecting military rule and demanding democracy. We saw the largest acts of protest in Myanmar’s history. It wasn’t long before the military and police began imprisoning and murdering civilians in staggering numbers, often in broad daylight. Friends and colleagues were arbitrarily arrested, including journalists, human rights defenders, and others. More than 10,000 people currently remain behind bars.
Working with the Schell Center at Yale Law School, Fortify Rights carried out an extensive investigation of the first six months of the junta’s crackdown. We just released a 193-page report on the crackdown, with a foreword by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews. In the report, we provide evidence that the Myanmar junta murdered, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, forcibly displaced, and persecuted civilians in acts that amount to crimes against humanity. We identify 61 senior military and police officials who should be investigated and possibly prosecuted for international crimes, only 20 of whom have been sanctioned by at least one government to date. We established and published the locations of 1,040 military units nationwide — the first list of its kind — which will help prosecutors geo-locate military battalions to atrocity-crime scenes. And we reveal new information about the military chain-of-command during the crackdown on peaceful protesters throughout the country, which will also assist in ensuring justice and accountability. The report provides the most thorough legal analysis to date of the junta’s widespread and systematic attacks.
We’re pressing for a global arms embargo to prevent the transfer of weapons that the junta uses to kill civilians. And we’re encouraging governments to prevent the junta from accessing funds or receiving any political legitimacy.
This work was already challenging, but the war in Ukraine has made it even more complicated, diverting the attention of people with power. That global shift in focus to Putin’s crimes is understandable given the geopolitical significance of what’s happening there. Still, Russia’s crimes and invasion of Ukraine are not unrelated to the situation in Myanmar. For years, the Russian government has supplied the Myanmar military with the weapons it is using to commit genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Russia routinely protects Myanmar from political and legal scrutiny at the highest levels, including at the U.N. Security Council. Beating the military in Myanmar is not unrelated to beating Putin in Ukraine. Both situations demand urgent and interrelated attention. Impunity for atrocity crimes is like a deadly virus. It travels and sustains itself, and any failure to end and remedy the atrocities now, whether in Myanmar or Ukraine, will only ensure more in the future.
Allen: Turning to focus on the largest refugee settlement in the world — the Rohingya camps near Cox’s Bazar in southeast Bangladesh, which now have grown to approximately 1 million people — can you share with us some background on the conditions in Myanmar that led to the Rohingya’s forced migration to Bangladesh?
Smith: The Rohingya are an ethnic minority indigenous to western Myanmar. They’re primarily Muslim in a predominantly Buddhist country. The Myanmar military has persecuted Rohingya people for decades, denying them citizenship, access to education, freedom of movement, and more. Rohingya in Rakhine State in Myanmar are not allowed to work, travel, own mobile phones, or enjoy any rights whatsoever.
Back in 2012, extensive attacks against Rohingya in Rakhine State amounted to atrocity crimes and resulted in the government confining more than 120,000 people to dozens of internment camps — layering crimes on top of crimes. The internment camps are modern-day concentration camps, creating conditions of life designed to be destructive to the very existence of the Rohingya.
In 2016, a Rohingya armed group attacked police, responding to decades of abuses. The unprecedented show of force led the Myanmar military to attack Rohingya civilians. Soldiers razed villages, committed massacres and other violence, and forced upwards of 80,000 to flee to Bangladesh. In August 2017, Rohingya militants attacked again, killing a dozen officers. This time, Myanmar authorities activated local non-Rohingya citizens, some of whom they had previously armed and trained, and together they systematically fanned out and brutally attacked Rohingya villages. Fortify Rights published a 160-page report detailing how the military prepared to commit genocide and then carried it out.
Soldiers, police, and “deputized” citizens hacked Rohingya civilians with machetes, slit throats, and fatally shot and burned thousands of Rohingya men, women, and children in a matter of weeks. Soldiers raped Rohingya women and girls and men and boys, killed infant children, arbitrarily arrested masses, and burned down several hundred villages in arson attacks, forcing more than 700,000 people to flee to Bangladesh. It was a scorched-earth genocide.
These attacks led The Republic of The Gambia to bring a case against Myanmar for genocide at the International Court of Justice, which Fortify Rights is supporting. We’re also sharing evidence with the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar created by the Human Rights Council to collect and preserve evidence of atrocities in Myanmar for future prosecution.
For years, one of Fortify Rights’ strategic objectives has been to get governments to acknowledge the Rohingya genocide. Working with Rohingya advocates and other partners, we focused attention on encouraging the U.S. government to issue a genocide determination, which had previously happened only seven times. Last month, Secretary Blinken announced that the U.S. formally determined that the Rohingya are facing genocide, which is momentous for the Rohingya people and will have significant ripple effects.
Allen: Focusing on the conditions in the camps, and particularly the plight of children in the camps, how have the Bangladesh authorities addressed their basic human right to an education?
Smith: Bangladesh welcomed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya-refugee arrivals, and deserves credit for that, but, unfortunately, the authorities are violating the rights of Rohingya, denying them freedom of movement, the right to livelihoods, access to justice, and, significantly, denying Rohingya children access to education.
The government doesn’t allow Rohingya to attend Bangladeshi schools, and now is preventing Rohingya from accessing education in the camps, too. Over the years, many Rohingya had established schools to ensure generations of youth wouldn’t be lost to the genocide. In December 2021, the government ordered the closure of camp-based schools, effectively denying Rohingya children access to any education, including community-led “private” schools, “home-based learning centers,” and early childhood development programs for children younger than five. In some cases, Bangladesh forces physically destroyed these schools.
This policy, which must be reversed, not only violates the basic right to education but also is entirely against the government's interests. The denial of education for Rohingya youth will leave young people with even fewer options, making them ripe targets for human traffickers, armed groups seeking to recruit and radicalize them, gangs, and the like. It is profoundly misguided to deny Rohingya youth an education.
Allen: What tactics is Fortify Rights employing to address the education of Rohingya youth in the camps?
Smith: Our team, including Human Rights Specialist Zaw Win and Senior Specialists John Quinley and Taimoor Sobhan, has worked closely with Rohingya in Myanmar and the camps in Bangladesh for many years. We’ve spoken with governments, humanitarian and U.N. agencies, and others about the violations we’re documenting in the camps. We’re supporting camp-based human rights defenders with training. We coordinate meetings with camp-based groups and do what we can to help them achieve their goals, including ensuring the right to education. We try to enable partners in the camps to access people in power and speak to the news media, and to increase the strategic visibility of their work and goals. But it’s not enough; we need more help.
Many Rohingya human rights defenders in the camps face serious security risks, so we also spend a lot of time behind the scenes ensuring protection for the most at-risk, getting them to safe spaces, and ensuring their safety as best we can.
On a positive note, for several years, in partnership with Doha Debates, we have provided smartphones to Rohingya in the camps, trained them in photography, and helped establish them on social media platforms so they can tell their own stories. In Myanmar, Rohingya would be imprisoned or worse for holding smartphones, and any photography would have invited severe reprisals from the Myanmar government and armed forces. In Bangladesh, the Rohingya Media Fellows we work with are garnering an online following and winning awards. Three Rohingya refugee Media Fellows, Fortify Rights and Doha Debates won a Shorty Award in 2020, a Communitas Award in 2021, and an Anthem Award this year for the project. We also made a documentary film called EXODUS, available online, that delves into the lives of the Media Fellows. We are making progress in honoring and lifting up the Rohingya refugees’ voices while we work to improve their conditions in the camps and change the trajectory of their narrative.
About the Author:
Julie Allen is a Senior Advisor at the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ms. Allen was a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow in 2020 and a Senior Fellow in 2021. Ms. Allen had a distinguished career in corporate law, focusing on capital markets, public company M&A transactions, and boardroom governance and counsel. Most recently, she was a senior partner at Proskauer Rose. She currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Read Ahead, a reading-based mentoring organization serving NYC public elementary school children, and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.