Making human rights documentation findable now and in the future
The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights recently convened a consultation meeting, bringing together leading human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society actors, and academic institutions from around the world. This gathering aimed to address the growing challenge of ensuring that crucial human rights documentation, particularly digital content, remains findable, verifiable, and usable for research, advocacy and accountability purposes.
The event brought together representatives from the Bonavero Institute, UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, the TRUE Project at Swansea University, Queen Mary University of London, and the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University, alongside the NGOs Airwars, Mnemonic, Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, and the WikiMedia Foundation. The meeting builds on the guide for judges and fact-finders to navigate digital open-source evidence co-authored by the Institute’s head of research, Başak Çalı and other members of this consultation group.
A central aim of the meeting was to create a more inclusive ecosystem in which frontline actors and organisations can choose to share their information with a host of accountability partners without having to have personal connections with those actors. This means moving beyond informal, ad-hoc networks where sharing vital human rights data often relies on personal relationships or limited, pre-existing trust.
Currently, crucial information collected by individuals or small organisations on the ground might not reach prosecutors, researchers, or other accountability bodies simply because those frontline actors do not have direct contacts within larger institutions, or because existing systems are too complex or insecure.
The goal of the initiative is to explore how to build a structured, secure, and accessible framework that allows anyone with legitimate, verified human rights documentation to share it with appropriate partners, regardless of their personal connections. This could effectively democratise access to justice-critical information, potentially ensuring that valuable evidence does not remain siloed but can contribute to broader accountability efforts.
The immediate and most significant tangible outcome of the workshop is the formation of a loose planning committee. This committee is comprised of key representatives from the participating universities and NGOs, signalling a strong commitment to sustained collaboration.
The committee would build on the workshop and explore developing new frameworks and standards for the initiative, including guidelines on data collection, verification, and access protocols, ensuring legal admissibility and adherence to human rights principles like privacy and data protection. It would also explore how to develop shared technological tools and platforms to facilitate secure, efficient, and standardized information exchange, and how to establish a roadmap for implementation.
The ultimate goal is to create a robust, accessible, and sustainable global infrastructure for human rights documentation. This will empower a wider range of actors to contribute to justice and accountability, ensuring that the digital record of human rights violations serves as a powerful tool for change, both now and for future generations.