After more than 10 years, Friedhelm Weinberg will be leaving HURIDOCS in early 2023. Having worked with him in person on many occasions, I can testify that his leadership has been most impressive, for the NGO itself [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/category/organisations/huridocs/] and the in the area of networking with others, such as the MEA and THF [see e.g. his: https://youtu.be/zDxPbd9St9Y]. In his own announcement, he modestly refers to all his colleagues:
It has been an incredible decade with HURIDOCS, working with amazing colleagues and partners at the intersection of human rights and technology. Together, we have drastically increased support to activists to leverage technology for documentation, litigation and advocacy work. We have pioneered flexible, reliable and robust software tools such as Uwazi, while responsibly sunsetting the past generation of open source software.
None of this would have been possible without the team we have built, and that was collaborating remotely across the globe well before 2020. It’s a committed, humorous and professional bunch, and I have learned so much with every single one of them, as we made things happen and as we hit walls and then picked each other up. I am also grateful to our board that brings together wisdom from leading NGOs, technology companies, the financial sector, but, more importantly, people that were generous with guidance, encouragement and critique.
It has also been a decade of many heartbreaks. From partners whose offices have been raided, that have been declared foreign agents, threatened, attacked. From wars and conflicts breaking out, affecting people we work with. From the difficulties of all we’re doing sometimes not being enough. From worrying how to raise the money to sustain and grow a team that can rise to these challenges.
It is a bittersweet departure, because it has been life-affirming – and yet it is for a perspective that fills me with warmth and excitement. For a while, I will be with our children, with the second one due to arrive in early 2023.
As I have made the decision to leave HURIDOCS, I also have felt really down and much of the stress built up over a decade manifested physically. Seeking treatment, I have been diagnosed with burnout and depression, and have been recovering with the support from specialists, friends and family. This is neither a badge of honor nor something I want to be shy about, it’s just the reason you haven’t seen much of me recently in professional circles. It’s getting better and I am grateful to have the time and space for healing.
Currently, Nancy Yu is leading HURIDOCS as Interim Executive Director, as Lisa Reinsberg as the Board Chair holds the space and directs the succession process. I am grateful to both of them to step up and step in, as well as the team, our partners and funders for a decade of working together to advance human rights.
As the search for his successor has started, please have a look at the recruitment announcement and consider applying or sharing it with suitable candidates: https://lnkd.in/e7Y7smqT
HURIDOCS has been working with urgency to meet the needs of our Ukrainian partners to enable effective, comprehensive and safe documentation of human rights violations. The HURIDOCS Team on 19 April 2022 tells how:
A maternity ward and children’s hospital are hit by an airstrike. Schools and apartment blocks are shelled. A psychiatric facility is attacked. Residential areas are targeted by cluster bombs. Critical infrastructure is struck by missiles. Mass civilian graves are discovered.
These horrendous attacks on civilians in Ukraine, some of them on healthcare facilities, are labelled by the United Nations as ‘acts of unconscionable cruelty’. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022, is unfolding as a series of atrocities committed against civilians.
Indiscriminate attacks using missiles, heavy artillery shells, rockets and airstrikes on civilians and non-combatants are in contravention of international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes. Apart from attacks on civilians, Russia is reported to be shelling agreed-upon humanitarian corridors from conflict zones and therefore halting mass evacuations.
Borodyanka, a Ukrainian commuter town near Kyiv, was among the first places to be hit by Russian airstrikes.
Kyiv Declaration calls for support to groups actively documenting violations
Leaders of more than 100 Ukrainian civil society organisations have published the Kyiv Declaration, which defines the invasion as “a war against the fundamental principles of democracy”. The #KyivDeclaration asks for solidarity and immediate action, and outlines six urgent appeals to the international community. The organisations are collectively calling for the creation of safe zones in Ukraine, military aid, sanctions against Russia, humanitarian aid, freezing assets and revoking visas of prominent Russian families, and providing equipment to track war crimes. This includes technology and support to groups who are actively documenting the events in Ukraine, as well as human rights groups and lawyers who will be supporting accountability efforts in the long run.
An appeal from 100 Ukrainian civil society leaders
HURIDOCS has been working with urgency to meet the needs of our Ukrainian partners to enable effective, comprehensive and safe documentation of human rights violations.
“When Russia started its full-scale invasion in February this year, we revived the work of EuromaidanSOS. We are faced with a large number of war crimes that need to be documented. Among these are indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, deliberate killings, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, enforced disappearances and other crimes listed in the Rome Statute. Such acts are not justified by any circumstances of the war. Russia is simply using war crimes as a way of waging war.
Our volunteers from EuromaidanSOS are based in different parts of the country, and some of them work directly in hot spots, where they face constant connectivity issues. This is why usable technical solutions are indispensable. As this work is undertaken in the context of war, it is important to have qualified technology support. We are very grateful to the organisations, such as HURIDOCS, providing it in this difficult time for us.”– Oleksandra Matviychuk, Head of the Center for Civil Liberties and Board Member of HURIDOCS
Documenting violations is vital for accountability
Four days into the Russian invasion, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor opened an investigation into war crimes being committed in Ukraine. In conjunction with the investigation, the ICC launched a contact portal and anyone with relevant information is urged to come forward and share the details with the ICC. The United Nations Human Rights Council expressed that it is gravely concerned about the escalating human rights and humanitarian crisis and passed a resolution to establish a Commission of Inquiry. The Commission will first and foremost collect evidence of violations and those responsible, and subsequently submit reports to the Human Rights Council and General Assembly. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Germany has launched an investigation by collecting evidence of suspected crimes on civilians and critical infrastructure. Germany’s probe is based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows countries to prosecute crimes against international law outside of its borders.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement where she expressed horror by the images of civilian bodies on the streets and in improvised graves in the town of Bucha. She stated that reports of egregious crimes raise serious questions about possible war crimes and grave breaches of international and humanitarian law. She urged that “it is vital that all efforts are made to ensure there are independent and effective investigations into what happened in Bucha to ensure truth, justice and accountability, as well as reparations and remedy for victims and their families”.
In addition to these and other measures already underway to investigate possible war crimes and breaches of international and humanitarian law, some of the most authoritative civil society organisations in Ukraine have established a global initiative to seek justice and hold perpetrators accountable. The ‘Breaking the Vicious Circle of Russia’s Impunity for Its War Crimes’ initiative was jointly established by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group and the Center for Civil Liberties, and is also known as the ‘Tribunal for Putin’.
The Tribunal for Putin aims to document events which can be classified as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Tribunal for Putin will also collect evidence and facts on the crimes committed and will work with existing international mechanisms of the United Nations, Council of Europe, OSCE, EU and the International Criminal Court. The initiative has called for support from various actors such as international organisations, networks, government agencies, public associations, volunteer initiatives and groups who all share the common goal of restoring peace in Ukraine and ensuring that justice will prevail.
Civil society plays a crucial role in seeking justice
In this context, it is clear that the systematic documentation of human rights violations, irrespective of who is committing the transgression, is critical to achieving justice and accountability. Documentation should not only be undertaken to assist future justice and accountability mechanisms but also to support the process of reckoning and healing.
Civil society plays a key role in efforts to document and monitor violations, and to build and strengthen cases for accountability. Civil society actors are usually the first to respond to crises, have the deepest community reach and can mobilise the people who are living through these experiences. Documenting human rights violations as they happen is imperative in the process of restoring justice. To effectively and safely assist the community there is a need for strong digital tools to gather, process, preserve, manage, protect and analyse the rapidly growing bodies of potential evidence, including large amounts of storage-intensive video. In addition, deterrence against the worst violations can also be established through credible documentation strategies.
HURIDOCS is a longtime supporter of civil society organisations and human rights defenders who use human rights documentation strategies and tools as a means to strengthen accountability and advocate for justice. We are already supporting a number of groups working on documenting human rights violations in Ukraine and HURIDOCS invites other initiatives who need support with their documentation efforts to contact us. We value diverse approaches to documenting violations, as it may strengthen accountability measures and aid in articulating narratives during the process of memorialisation.
Support for documenting violations in Ukraine
With the increased need for support to document violations in Ukraine to strengthen accountability, the Alfred Landecker Foundation has partnered with HURIDOCS to increase our capacity to support civil society-led initiatives where our expertise can be helpful. HURIDOCS is grateful to the Foundation for the support, as it comes at a time when documenting threats to peace, justice and democracy is critical. The support from the Alfred Landecker Foundation will be used to assist groups who are already participating in documentation efforts, and to aid other initiatives related to documenting violations in Ukraine.
HURIDOCS is currently supporting our partners in the following ways:
Training and consultation on information collection, protection and management techniques and associated tools, such as Uwazi;
Setting up digital information repositories to securely store sensitive data;
Refinement and integration of existing technology solutions to document, protect and analyse evidence of human rights violations; and
Hardening and scaling infrastructure to preserve and protect large amounts of information.
There is a significant and growing need to support organisations with their efforts to gather, process, preserve, manage, protect and analyse information on abuses. Reliable documentation of violations is essential for the restoration of justice in the pursuit of upholding democracy and human rights.
A new database project is memorializing the “footprints” of people taken by North Korea
With support from HURIDOCS, the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) and its partners recently launched Footprints, an open archive that documents arbitrary detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances committed in and by North Korea. The database, which was created in Uwazi with HURIDOCS support, features files on nearly 20,000 cases since the 1950s. The collaboration is profiled in a newly published blog post: <https://5if28.r.a.d.sendibm1.com/mk/cl/f
With the launching of the new Digest of human rights laureates by True Heroes Films (THF) today, 2 February 2021, I have decided to centre my blog more on human rights awards and laureates. It will give the blog more focus and this will also help the Digest to stay up to date. After many years of work, True Heroes Films (THF) has made public its gateway to human rights awards and their laureates at www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest. The Digest is a new free online tool that gives everybody access to information on human rights awards, including the list of people who received such awards. Over the last 20 years, the human rights movement has discovered the value of awards. The Digest tells that story and makes human rights defenders more visible as an encouragement and role model for others.
Here some specialised user comments: The Digest “will help us demonstrate to the world how many human rights defenders there are in the world and the different human rights they defend and fight for” stated Guadalupe Marengo, Head of Global Human Rights Defenders Programme at Amnesty International.
“It is a useful resource that places individuals, the laureates, at the heart of the search process,” commented Eleanor Davies of the Centre of Applied Human Rights at York University.
“With a simple and straightforward way to find what you are looking for, it helps initiate partnerships,” says Friedhelm Weinberg, Executive Director of HURIDOCS, an organisation specialised in information technology.
For human rights defenders, the Digest allows finding awards and people concerned with similar causes worldwide. Award givers can quickly check their candidates. For media, the Digest means instant access to information on human rights defenders or an award announcement to complete their story.
The Digest was created during 8 years with support from the City of Geneva, Brot für die Welt and the Permanent Mission of the Netherlands to the United Nations Office.
The SIM team in 1984, Bert Verstappen on the right
It is usually not a compliment when somebody is described as ‘furniture’. But Bert Verstappen, senior documentalist at HURIDOCS, is the exception. And the furniture in mind is an expensive, solid oak Dutch cupboard where all valuables are kept. Bert Verstappen – an historian by education – started working as a conscientious objector doing alternative service in the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights (SIM) in approximately 1983, soon after I became the founding director.
He proved his value immediately by working on themes such as documenting human rights violations and together we started a long term research project on the practice of fact finding by NGOs, which resulted in the first-of-its-kind publication of Human Rights Missions, a Study of the Fact‑Finding Practice ofNon‑governmental Organizations, published in 1986 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (ISBN: 90 247 3355 3). Morever, as SIM had become the initial ‘secretariat’ of the new HURIDOCS network created in 1982, Bert gave a lot of support to the fledgling unit. In 1987 HURIDOCS moved to Oslo and Bert moved with it, learned Norwegian very quickly and kept the flame burning for many years. He moved to Geneva with HURIDOCS after the big Crete conference in 1992.
Bert (l.) 1993 in Geneva with Theo van Boven and Oldrich Andrysek
There he continued to coordinate the work of different task forces and co-authored essential HURIDOCS publications. He was involved in many capacity building projects, providing expertise mainly from the documentation angle. As from 1 October 2019 he goes into retirement but will remain involved in some HURIDOCS projects on a part-time basis until the end of the year, ensuring a “soft bertxit”.
“The development of new tools deeply changed HURIDOCS’ work throughout the years. We renew ourselves constantly. I have committed my career to this exciting challenge because I want to feel useful to human right defenders. Their courage is a source of inspiration for all of us” says Bert Verstappen on the HURIDOCS website
If you want to know more about the history of HURIDOCS in which Bert has played such an important role, see:
On 1 May 2019 Friedhelm Weinberg, Executive Director, HURIDOCS, published “3 ways activists are being targeted by cyberattacks’ on the website of World Economic Forum (see below). A timely piece in view of the current turmoil surrounding the discovery of spyware crafted by a sophisticated hackers-for-hire, who took advantage of a flaw in WhatsApp. The Financial Times identified the actor as Israel’s NSO Group, and WhatsApp all but confirmed the identification, describing hackers as “a private company that has been known to work with governments to deliver spyware.” .. As late as Sunday, as WhatsApp engineers raced to close the loophole, a UK-based human rights lawyer’s phone was targeted using the same method. Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said they believed that the spyware attack on Sunday was linked to the same vulnerability that WhatsApp was trying to patch. NSO’s flagship product is Pegasus, a program that can turn on a phone’s microphone and camera, trawl through emails and messages and collect location data. NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and western intelligence agencies, and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime. … Asked about the WhatsApp attacks, NSO said it was investigating the issue. “Under no circumstances would NSO be involved in the operating or identifying of targets of its technology, which is solely operated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” the company said. “NSO would not, or could not, use its technology in its own right to target any person or organisation, including this individual [the UK lawyer].”
Several reports have shown Israeli technology being used by Gulf states against their own citizens (AFP/File photo)
Middle East Eye of 13 May 2019 reports that Amnesty International is pushing for Israel’s defence ministry to withdraw an export license for NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm that the human rights group has accused of selling spyware to repressive governments to spy on activists. In a statement on Monday, Amnesty said it plans to file a legal petition to the District Court of Tel Aviv on Tuesday to block the export licenses. Danna Ingleton, deputy director of Amnesty Tech, said in an affidavit on Monday that NSO Group has not done its job to protect human rights defenders from being targeted. Instead, many reports have shown that governments have deployed Pegasus spyware “to surveil human rights defenders”, Ingleton said.
NSO Group has been under increased scrutiny after a series of reports about the ways in which its spyware programme has been used against prominent human rights activists. Last year, a report by CitizenLab, a group at the University of Toronto, showed that human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were targeted with the software.
In October, US whistleblower Edward Snowden said Pegasus had been used by the Saudi authorities to surveil journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his death. “They are the worst of the worst,” Snowden said of the firm. Amnesty International said in August that a staffer’s phone was infected with the Pegasus software via a WhatsApp message.
——-
Friedhelm Weinberg‘s piece of 1 May is almost prescient and contains good, broader advice:
When activists open their inboxes, they find more than the standard spam messages telling them they’ve finally won the lottery. Instead, they receive highly sophisticated emails that look like they are real, purport to be from friends and invite them to meetings that are actually happening. The catch is: at one point the emails will attempt to trick them.
1. Phishing for accounts, not compliments
In 2017, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, documented what they called the “Nile Phish” campaign, a set of emails luring activists into giving access to their most sensitive accounts – email and file-sharing tools in the cloud. The Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group recently warned on its Facebook page about a very similar campaign. As attacks like these have mounted in recent years, civil society activists have come together to defend themselves, support each other and document what is happening. The Rarenet is a global group of individuals and organizations that provides emergency support for activists – but together it also works to educate civil society actors to dodge attacks before damage is done. The Internet Freedom Festival is a gathering dedicated to supporting people at risk online, bringing together more than 1,000 people from across the globe. The emails from campaigns like Nile Phish may be cunning and carefully crafted to target individual activists.. – they are not cutting-edge technology. Protection is stunningly simple: do nothing. Simply don’t click the link and enter information – as hard as it is when you are promised something in return.
Often digital security is about being calm and controlled as much as it is about being savvy in the digital sphere. And that is precisely what makes it difficult for passionate and stressed activists!
2. The million-dollar virus
Unfortunately, calm is not always enough. Activists have also been targeted with sophisticated spyware that is incredibly expensive to procure and difficult to spot. Ahmed Mansoor, a human-rights defender from the United Arab Emirates, received messages with malware (commonly known as computer viruses) that cost one million dollars on the grey market, where unethical hackers and spyware firms meet. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/08/29/apple-tackles-iphone-one-tap-spyware-flaws-after-mea-laureate-discovers-hacking-attempt/]
Rights defender Ahmed Mansoor in Dubai in 2011. Image: Reuters/Nikhil Monteiro
3. Shutting down real news with fake readers
Both phishing and malware are attacks directed against the messengers, but there are also attacks against the message itself. This is typically achieved by directing hordes of fake readers to the real news – that is, by sending so many requests through bot visitors to websites that the servers break down under the load. Commonly referred to as “denial of service” attacks, these bot armies have also earned their own response from civil society. Specialised packages from Virtual Road or Deflect sort fake visitors from real ones to make sure the message stays up.
How distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have grown. Image: Kinsta.com; data from EasyDNS
Recently, these companies also started investigating who is behind these attacks– a notoriously difficult task, because it is so easy to hide traces online. Interestingly, whenever Virtual Road were so confident in their findings that they publicly named attackers, the attacks stopped. Immediately. Online, as offline, one of the most effective ways to ensure that attacks end is to name the offenders, whether they are cocky kids or governments seeking to stiffle dissent. But more important than shaming attackers is supporting civil society’s resilience and capacity to weather the storms. For this, digital leadership, trusted networks and creative collaborations between technologists and governments will pave the way to an internet where the vulnerable are protected and spaces for activism are thriving.
Google announced on 7 May 2019 that the Geneva-based NGO is one of 20 organizations that will share 25 million US dollars in grants from the Google Artificial Intelligence Impact Challenge. The Google Artificial Intelligence Impact Challenge was an open call to nonprofits, social enterprises, and research institutions to submit their ideas to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help address societal challenges. Over 2600 organizations from around the world applied.
Geneva-based HURIDOCS will receive a grant of 1 million US dollars to develop and use machine learning methods to extract, explore and connect relevant information in laws, jurisprudence, victim testimonies, and resolutions. Thanks to these, the NGO will work with partners to make documents better and freely accessible. This will benefit anyone interested in using human rights precedents and laws, for example to lawyers representing victims of human rights violations or students researching non-discrimination.
The machine learning work to liberate information from documents is grounded in more than a decade of work that HURIDOCS has done to provide free access to information. Through pioneering partnerships with the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), HURIDOCS has co-created some of the most used public human rights databases. A key challenge in creating these databases has been the time-consuming and error-prone manual adding of information – a challenge the machine learning techniques will be used to overcome.
“We have been experimenting with machine learning techniques for more than two years”, said Natalie Widmann, Artificial Intelligence Specialist at HURIDOCS. “We have changed our approach countless times, but we see a clear path to how they can be leveraged in groundbreaking ways to democratise access to information.” HURIDOCS will use the grant from Google to work with partners to co-create the solutions, carefully weighing ethical concerns of automation and focusing on social impact. All the work will be done in the open, including all code being released publicly.
“We are truly excited by the opportunity to use these technologies to address a problem that has been holding the human rights movement back”, said Friedhelm Weinberg, Executive Director of HURIDOCS. “We are thankful to Google for the support and look forward to be working with their experts and what will be a fantastic cohort of co-grantees.”
“We received thousands of applications to the Google AI Impact Challenge and are excited that HURIDOCS was selected to receive funding and expertise from Google. AI is at a nascent stage when it comes to the value it can have for the social impact sector, and we look forward to seeing the outcomes of this work and considering where there is potential for use to do even more.” – Jacquelline Fuller, President of Google.org
Next week, the HURIDOCS team will travel to San Francisco to work with the other grantees, Google AI experts, Project Managers and the startup specialists from Google’s Launchpad Accelerator for a program that will last six months, from May to November 2019. Each organization will be paired a Google expert who will meet with them regularly for coaching sessions, and will also have access to other Google resources and expert mentorship.
Are you an organisation, human rights group, or activist registering, documenting, analysing human rights cases? HURIDOCS invites you to join this webinar and discussion of the events method for documenting human rights violations!
What: Presentation and discussion on the events method for documenting human rights violations
Who: Bert Verstappen, Senior Documentalist at HURIDOCS
When: Thursday, 7 March 2019 from 14:00 to 15:30 UTC/GMT
Data is like water – it needs a container to make it useful. The beginning of a human rights documentation projects often starts with containers like lists and spreadsheets. But at some point, the information will outgrow these containers – both in terms of quantity and complexity.
The way you design these containers will have an impact on what information you will gather, how you organise the information, and the kind of analysis you can carry out. HURIDOCS and its network developed the Events Standard Formats methodology (we now call the events method) – to provide a container specifically for organisations documenting human rights violations.
The purpose of the events method is to capture essential information with regard to individual cases of human rights violations in order to better understand patterns of violence, including “who did what to whom”. It involves gathering information about:
facts: what happened, where, and when
the possible human rights violations that were committed
the persons involved: which alleged perpetrator did what to which victim, what are the sources of information and which interventions were made.
A global cooperation platform has been launched to advance the fight against torture and ill-treatment worldwide: https://www.startnext.com/atlas-of-torture. The Atlas of Torture – developed by Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Austria together with HURIDOCS– aims at providing the largest database on torture and ill-treatment, a map of organisations and activities as well as a learning and exchange platform for states, researchers, human rights defenders and the general public. Thereby they want to raise awareness, improve the access to information, strengthen cooperation and empower people worldwide. The project has already been endorsed by many human rights experts (from the UN SPT, Council of Europe, NGOs, academics and medical professionals). You will be able to view their testimonials over the coming weeks on the project’s Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/Atlas-of-Torture-115526871812308/> and Twitter <https://twitter.com/AtlasofTorture> channels.
A concept note with more details is available from: contact@atlas-of-torture.org
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 