A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Annelieke van de Wiel and Survivor Corps in Uganda

Annelieke van de Wiel will be working this summer as an AP Peace Fellow, supporting an AP project that works with IDP populations in conflict-stricken Northern Uganda.

Annelieke started her academic career by studying modern history, religion studies, anthropology and human rights at the University of Utrecht. Irresistibly drawn to travel, to learning foreign languages and experiencing different cultures, she paid for her trips by working in bars and restaurants, in among other places Bournemouth, London, Edinburgh and Barcelona. During a student exchange in Buenos Aires she witnessed the legacy and trauma of years of violent political suppression. Upon her return she felt she could no longer be a mere bystander to human suffering deriving from persecution, violence and the denial of fundamental human rights.

She started volunteering at the asylum Application Centre at Amsterdam Airport, assisting asylum seekers and refugees who had just arrived in The Netherlands with their asylum application. It was, here, through many memorable and touching encounters with people who had just fled from violence that she developed a deep respect for their suffering and courage. Most importantly, she also came to feel a duty to use the education and opportunities available to her to help.

She changed her course of studies to public international law at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on human rights and national and international refugee law. She became President of the University of Amsterdam Student Association of International Law, and in that capacity has organized a wide variety of symposia and activities addressing human rights. She continued to volunteer at the Application Centre, working with asylum seekers. For the last half a year she has also been an intern at the UNHCR national office in The Hague.

While the project in Uganda itself is still taking shape, Annelieke is very much looking forward to finally working with the people she committed herself to a few years ago. Not by studying their problems in an academic light, not by helping file an asylum application far away from their homes, not by writing about them in an office in The Hague, but by working with them, shoulder to shoulder, in their own country.

Annelieke is thrilled she can now finally work in the field through AP.

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