Incorporates first-person interviews with people who invented and implemented Amnesty International’s Urgent Action approach to demonstrate how early human rights advocacy implemented three tools of the justice of neighborhood - active care, habit, and appeals - and became a bridge to further political realization of justice. The chapter begins with a focus on a critical period in the early 1970s, when Amnesty International transitioned from working only for people imprisoned for nonviolent speech or beliefs, protected as “human rights” in articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to fighting to protect all people from torture and other forms of ill-treatment. Discusses the development of the Urgent Action approach in the USA and Germany. Discusses Amnesty International’s present-day Urgent Action approaches and questions related to effectiveness.

As a quasi-judicial body, the WGAD operates without a formal set of rules but is instead guided in implementing its mandate by its Methods of Work, which explain the overall process by which to submit a case for consideration.1 That said, however, the WGAD considers individual cases brought to it in closed sessions of its members and staff. And the day-to-day operations of the WGAD are run by a small secretariat of staff of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in its Special Procedures Branch, led by its Secretary. This chapter will illuminate and elucidate how an individual case can most effectively be brought to the WGAD, supplementing the procedures described in the Methods of Work with the author’s practical experience gained from having taken more than forty-five cases to the WGAD and having interviewed many current and former WGAD members and staff.