The Free State Centre for Human Rights is a critical, interdisciplinary, and contextually engaged research, advocacy, and legal-practice institution, focusing in its work on the relationship between human rights and transformation.

This relationship is approached from a critical perspective that recognises its double-handed nature; the fact that human rights, in whatever context, relate both positively and negatively to transformation, can both enable and hinder transformation.

Within the broad framework-concern with the relationship between human rights and transformation, the Centre’s work coalesces around three thematic focus areas: impoverishment; democracy; and identity. This means that the Centre’s work and its research community is interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of different disciplines and combining insights and wisdom from a variety of fields.

Although the Centre is primarily an academic research institution, its work is contextually engaged. Apart from its Research and Postgraduate Division, the Centre consists of an Advocacy Division that engages in transformation related human rights advocacy on the UFS campus and a Legal Services Division that operates as a Free State-focused public interest litigation unit in cooperation with the UFS Law Clinic.

All the Centre’s work is geographically located: research, advocacy, and litigation focus on issues on the UFS campuses, in Bloemfontein and in the Free State Province.