Posts Tagged ‘documentalist’

Tribute to James Lawson of the Council of Europe

February 17, 2024

Bert Verstappen – retired from HURIDOCS – wrote the following tribute to a person who – from an intergovernmental position – contributed greatly to the development of the NGO network:

It is with deep sadness that HURIDOCS has to announce the unexpected passing away on 11 February of James Lawson. James had a leading function in the field of information management in the Council of Europe. In addition, he devoted a huge amount of time and energy to HURIDOCS.

James was a visionary who introduced new tools and techniques for human rights information handling to the HURIDOCS network. He was keen to share his enthusiasm for developments in the field of information management that could and should benefit human rights organisations. He was convinced that, in the age of the Internet, librarians continue to play an important role as information sharers.

A major initiative taken by James was the multilingual human rights search engine HuriSearch. He planned HuriSearch as from 1998. HuriSearch provided a singular point of access to information published on over 5’000 websites of human rights organisations worldwide. HuriSearch indexed and crawled about 8 to 10 million web pages. It was publicly available from 2003 until 2016.

James was an active and committed member of the HURIDOCS Continuation Committee – as its Board was called for many years. He served on the CC from 1992 to 2009. He was HURIDOCS Treasurer and as leader of the Task Force on Software Development oversaw the development of HURIDOCS’ tools and techniques.

James was also Coordinator and Chairperson of a large number of meetings of the European Co-ordination Committee on Human Rights Documentation https://www.ecchrd.org/. During these meetings, he introduced advances in technology such as the use of metadata and the eXtended Markup Language XML.

James also provided various trainings on human rights documentation on behalf of HURIDOCS. Among other activities, he trained NGOs preparing evidence for Truth Commission in South Africa and was the main resource person in a training for French-speaking African trainers in Senegal. He also held HURIDOCS trainings with local human rights organisations in Burkina Faso, the DR Congo, Georgia, Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia and other countries.

HURIDOCS thanks James for his engagement and expertise. We wish strength to Hanne and his daughters.

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‘Bertxit’: ..Bert Verstappen leaves HURIDOCS after 32 years

September 27, 2019

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 of Non‑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:

“We were breaking new ground”

and about the organnisation today: https://www.huridocs.org/who-we-are/

Posted in human rights, Human Rights Defenders, HURIDOCS | 2 Comments »
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