By Grace Lile | May 16th, 2012 I’m excited to announce that starting today (May 16) through May 22 my fellow
 From New Tactics website page for "Archiving Human Rights" online dialogue At WITNESS we’ve long incorporated archiving as an important component of our work, but generally speaking archives and preservation have taken a backseat to more urgent aspects of human rights advocacy. That is beginning to change; human rights archives are increasingly playing a pivotal role in advocacy, restorative justice, historical memory, and struggles against impunity.
At the same time, however, archivists and activists alike are grappling with the mounting challenges posed by the proliferation of digital documentation. For example, an overwhelming quantity of human rights video has emerged from the Arab Spring, from the Occupy movement, from efforts to document election fraud in Russia and elsewhere, but the infrastructure, training, and resources to ensure its survival are lacking. As archivists what can we do to change this? How can we ensure that the critical documentation created today will be preserved and accessible in the future?
Among the questions we’ll be discussing:
- Why are human rights archives important?
- Why should human rights activists be concerned with archiving?
- How are human rights archives grappling with challenges associated with citizen documentation, mobile and social media, live/real-time content, and other new and dynamic digital media?
- How do decisions about access get made when a collective right to know conflicts with an individual’s right to privacy?
- What are some available easy-to-use tools and resources for activists and small NGOs or collectives with archiving needs?
- What are the biggest gaps and challenges currently in human rights archiving, and what ideas or steps might be taken to address them?
We have a terrific group of featured practitioners from a range of backgrounds, specializations, and regions, but we urge anyone with expertise or experience to share, or a desire to learn more, to please join in. Simply follow these instructions from New Tactics to register and take part. See you there!
The second Sunday in May is celebrated as Mother’s Day here in the United States (and in other countries). With that in mind, I asked my colleagues who are also mothers at WITNESS if they’d be willing to share some thoughts on what human rights issues hit closest to home for them.
I, too, am a WITNESS mom, and share my thoughts at the end of the post. If you are a mother and feel strongly about a human rights issue in light of your parenting role, or want to reflect on an issue that is or was of special importance to your mother, we’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.
And to mothers everywhere we wish you peace and a Happy Mother’s Day.
Claire Davis
“For me, the work we do on gender-based violence (GBV) hits closest to home. My mother was a survivor of [...]
Continue reading Mother’s Day Reflections on Human Rights from WITNESS Moms
By M.J. Moneymaker | May 10th, 2012 At WITNESS, we rotate facilitators at our weekly staff meetings. If assigned as facilitator, the person is responsible for doing some research and sharing a current advocacy video of interest. My turn up, I screened the doGooder Nonprofit Video Award winner, “Protect Our Defenders.” The video addresses rape in the military.
Everyone seemed moved. It was obvious by their reaction why this video was a winner. So, I asked the room, “What moments in the video do you remember or stood out?” Answers: the statistics, the video included a male subject, the rape kit, the Congresswoman’s closing statement.
The Storytelling Arch of an Advocacy Video
Armed with this information, I revisited the 1:45-minute video. The WITNESS training materials collectively state that stories should have a beginning, middle and end (also see Aristotle’s Poetics).
Photo credit: http://ifp.12writing.com/2011/02/writing-conflict-freytags-pyramid-and.html
Using this information, I broke down the elements further, relating them to [...]
Continue reading Anatomy of a Good Advocacy Video
By Kelly Matheson | May 8th, 2012 In 533 A.D., Roman Emperor Justinian asked his top legal scholars to write the most important laws of the Empire. They deemed,
By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind; the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea.
Justinian concluded that these essential, common, natural resources belong to everyone and not just the Emperor or the privileged. Consequently, the Roman Empire protected these resources in trust, for the public. The King of England was the next to adopt this wisdom. Then, at the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Justinian’s wisdom to protect, by law, our essential common natural resources for the present, as well as future, generations of Americans.
This hallowed legal principle, referred to as the Public Trust Doctrine, is perhaps most simply explained by 11-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez:
Federal agencies understand that public trust [...]
Continue reading TRUST Colorado: Understanding What It Means to Protect Our Atmosphere
This week marked the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. President Obama marked the event by making an unannounced trip to Afghanistan to sign a treaty with President Karzai establishing post-war relationship. And today, the United States Military Academy released select documents that were seized in the raid that killed Bin Laden and translated them into English.
The death of Osama Bin Laden was, at the very least, a symbolic victory in the “war on terror.” The title of the New York Times’ piece on the recovered documents was “Recovered Documents Show a Divided Al Qaeda.” The story seems to indicate that Al Qaeda is not as strong as when it attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
But are we safer now than we were 10 years ago as a result of our policies and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what [...]
Continue reading Osama Bin Laden is Dead but the “War on Terror” Lives On
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