Annual Report 2025

When the foundations of a field start shifting, the instinct is to do more of what we know.

Looking for a different frame, we went back to a moment when the human rights movement was still fighting for its basic premise, before the norms, before the conventions, before the international architecture we now know. Yet it was facing as many challenges as it does today.

We looked at the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s United States. And we found a speech from Robert F. Kennedy, in New York in May 1964, that stopped us:

Progress is a nice word.
But change is its motivator.
And change has its enemies. Robert F. Kennedy, New York City, 25 May 1964

The resistance is not to the destination, it is to the change required to get there; the requirement for changing how we work is even greater in difficult times.

Two years in, we added one word: Partnerships. Because change does not move through single actors. It moves through combinations.

Hence the name. And hence the work.

Over the past year, we restructured how we work. What may look like a brand refresh is, in fact, a deliberate realignment of our methods with the realities organisations face today. The international order is more fragmented, political environments are less predictable, and the distance between evidence and impact has grown. In response, we organised our work around three distinct but connected capabilities — research, strategy, and advocacy — each delivered through a dedicated Lab.

We believe meaningful change requires strategic clarity, institutional traction, and rigorous foresight.

We want to ensure that we are able to provide support to build institutional resilience and strategic positioning with the partners we engage with, to act effectively in environments that are actively working against them.

We initiate in collaboration with civil society. When we see a gap, we act. Always in collaboration with civil society organisations, we build platforms and spaces the sector needs but no single organisation is positioned to create alone.

European Center for Not-for-Profit Law

» More about ECNL: https://ecnl.org/

Groupe de Recherche Action sur la Sécurité Humaine

» More about GRASH: https://grash.bf

Campaign to End Repression in Azerbaijan

» More about the Campaign: https://www.endrepression-az.org/

Human Rights Compass was launched in March 2025 in response to an urgent and defining moment: the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House coinciding with an accelerating erosion of the international human rights framework. Political instability, foreign policy reversals, and shrinking civic space had left the human rights community fragmented at precisely the point when coordination mattered most. Human Rights Compass was built to fill that gap, as a convening platform where human rights defenders, experts, and organisations could jointly analyse what was happening and translate that shared understanding into concrete policy recommendations.

Over the course of its first year, the initiative has brought together over 120 human rights defenders, policy analysts, and multilateral actors from across the wider European and international human rights community. Participants include frontline defenders and civil society leaders, academics, independent experts, and practitioners with experience at the UN, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and the EU.

Endorsed by a number of NGOs and human rights defenders, we also established an Editorial Committee composed of senior figures including former and current leaders from Human Rights Watch and Open Society Foundations. It has provided rigorous oversight of all published outputs.

Through a series of strategic convenings, Human Rights Compass has created a space for structured, closed-door exchange under Chatham House rules, allowing participants to speak candidly about emerging threats and to develop shared analytical frameworks.

These convenings have fed directly into six policy publications, each jointly authored and collectively reviewed. The briefs have addressed some of the most pressing challenges facing the human rights field: the human rights consequences of global foreign policy realignment; the dangerous drift between humanitarian aid and human rights protection; the fragmentation of the multilateral human rights system; the shrinking space and growing dangers faced by human rights defenders; the global rollback of gender equality; and a comprehensive mapping of the top ten human rights trends shaping 2026. Each publication has been accompanied by direct dissemination to institutional mailing lists, media outreach, and op-ed placements.

As Human Rights Compass enters its second year, it is deepening its regional focus, which applies the same model of joint analysis and coordinated advocacy to one of the most strategically complex and under-served human rights environments in the wider European neighbourhood.

What began as a rapid response to a moment of crisis has become a sustained and growing platform. Human Rights Compass has demonstrated that bringing the right people together — with the right structure, the right analytical rigour, and a shared commitment to action — produces outputs that matter and that reach the people who need them.

Co-initiated with Palimpsest GmbH, Human Rights Compass also witnesses Progress & Change Partnerships convening power.

We live along faultlines: places where rights, power, and principles collide. Some cracks are loud. Others are quiet.

Notes from the Faultline is the Research Lab's product, offering analysis of the tensions shaping civic space, democracy, multilateralism, planetary justice and fundamental liberties. It is rooted in Progress & Change Partnerships' direct engagement with partners holding the line in difficult environments, which means the analysis starts from practice.

The publication exists on three channels:

• On BlueSky, Notes from the Faultline maintains a dedicated presence at @faultlinenotes.bsky.social, tracking developments in real time and reaching an audience that is already building an alternative to the more algorithmically driven platforms;
• On LinkedIn, the newsletter brings longer-form reflection to the professional networks where much of the policy debate on human rights and multilateralism actually happens;
• Dispatches are the flagship format: substantive, argument-driven publications that take a position. They are not surveys of existing literature, they are contributions to live debates, with concrete recommendations.

Our work and expertise are regularly featured in international, regional, and national media. From interviews and op-eds to news articles and broadcasts, these appearances reflect the relevance of our causes and amplify the voices of those we work with.

For us, 2026 is about consolidation and depth, not breadth. The three Labs are operational; the question now is how far each can be pushed.

We are formalising the Thought Circle as a standing group of honorary thinkers and practitioners who contribute to our work without sitting on any governance body. It is not a panel of experts speaking on behalf of Progress & Change Partnerships. It is a group of friends whose judgment we trust, who agree to be associated with the work and to challenge it when it needs challenging. The first members are Oleksandra Matviichuk, Maina Kiai, Dr. Vesna Pušić, and Anar Mammadli, whose membership is our way of stating that detention does not silence him.

The defining theme of the coming year is exile: as civic space contracts in more countries, the number of human rights defenders who must continue their work from abroad has grown sharply. So has the number of organisations that can no longer operate from the country whose population they serve. For many, it has become the basic condition of their work, and the human rights infrastructure has not adjusted.

We will deepen our engagement with and support to civil society in exile and to organisations needing to operate from abroad. That includes the practical work: how to maintain credibility when no longer on the ground, how to protect the people one represents from association, how to preserve institutional memory when the team is scattered across jurisdictions, and how to keep funders confident through what is often a long transition. It also includes the political work: making the case that exiled civil society is a distinct civil society, with specific needs and a specific value, rather than a diminished version of the one that came before.

At the same time, Human Rights Compass entered its second year applying the same convening model to one of the most strategically complex environments. Notes from the Faultline will publish further Dispatches on the questions the moment forces. The Campaign to End Repression in Azerbaijan continues its three-pillar work, with Anar Mammadli's release as its central demand.

The conditions for our work in 2026 are unlikely to be easier than those of 2025. We are ready for that as well.

Special thanks to our partners who trusted us over this year, in particular colleagues at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) and Azerbaijani colleagues linked to the Campaign to End Repression in Azerbaijan and their international partners. We are incredibly honoured to have seen so many human rights defenders and experts trust us and contribute to the Human Rights Compass framework.

We also warmly thank our donors who trusted our work and accepted to finance projects hosted and powered by Progress & Change Partnerships.

We would also like to express special thanks to friends of Progress & Change, who have worked with us on delivering our services throughout the year, especially our International Human Rights Law Advisors Tamar Chanturia and Alexandra Swetzer, our International Campaigns & Communications Advisor Clément Piguet, and designer Rea Zhushi.

We are particularly thankful for the wonderful cooperation with Palimpsest GmbH's Anna Sevortian, co-initiator of Human Rights Compass.