Standing initiatives
Projects start and finish. Campaigns run their course. Initiatives are the things we have committed to doing continuously, and which we would have to explain ourselves for stopping.
Six commitments
These are not aspirations. Each one is a rule that changes what happens at a desk on an ordinary Tuesday, and each one costs us something to keep.
Every public-facing material and every facilitated session is available in English, Hindi, Telugu, and Urdu.
A right explained in a language the listener does not use is not an explanation. We treat translation as part of the work rather than as an accessory to it, and we recruit facilitators locally so that idiom travels with the language.
No guidance is offered at any desk until the account has been recorded, dated, and given a reference number.
Advice given before the facts are written down tends to be advice about a story rather than about a situation. Recording first also means the person leaves with something that exists independently of whoever happened to be at the desk that day.
Every desk conversation opens with what ACHRC cannot do, before anything else is discussed.
People frequently arrive having been told by someone else that their case can be handled. Correcting that expectation at the start costs a difficult two minutes and prevents a far more damaging misunderstanding later.
Complainant identity is separated from anything we publish, and stays in the confidential register.
Identifying details are recorded once, with consent, and are never carried into analysis, reports, or public material. Where a pattern is published, it is published in a form that cannot be reverse-engineered to a person.
When we publish something and it turns out to be wrong, the correction is published rather than quietly edited in.
An organisation that documents other people's failures has no standing to hide its own. Corrections carry the date of the original error and the date of the correction.
Income and property are applied solely to the registered objects of the society.
There is no distribution of profit to members or office-bearers. Accounts are placed before the General Body, and interests are declared before matters in which they arise are discussed.
Why publish these
We put these in public so that the difference between what we say we do and what we actually do is something you can hold us to rather than something only we can see.
Tell us. A grievance about ACHRC goes to the same desk as any other, gets the same written reference number, and is placed before the Executive Committee if it concerns a standard on this page.
File a grievance about usThe documentation and research method sets out exactly how an account moves from a desk to a published finding, and what stops it along the way.
Our research methodGovernance
The General Body and the Executive Committee hold these commitments. Meetings are minuted, interests are declared, and accounts are placed before the members.
