The City of Geneva and the Martin Ennals Foundation announce the 2013 edition of Martin Ennals Award, which will take place on Tuesday 8 October 2013 at 18h00 at the Uni-Dufour, Geneva. The Laureate will be announced Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged ‘HURIDOCS’
SAVE THE DATE: MEA 2013 CEREMONY ON 8 OCTOBER IN GENEVA
June 29, 2013Tomorrow, 24 April, comes announcement of the Final Nominees of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders
April 23, 2013Tomorrow, 24 April, at 11hoo Geneva time, the three Final Nominees of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders 2013 will be announced. You can find the result here on this blog, of course, or on the site of the Martin Ennals Award: http://www.martinennalsaward.org. The following 10 NGOs on the Jury will also carry the news:
Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders
– Amnesty International,
– Human Rights Watch,
– Human Rights First,
– Int’l Federation for Human Rights,
– World Organisation Against Torture,
– Front Line Defenders
– International Commission of Jurists,
– German Diakonie,
– International Service for Human Rights
– HURIDOCS.
HURIDOCS: bursting with new ideas for documenting human rights: case law in Africa and the Americas
February 25, 2013The HURIDOCS network publishes a Newsletter with many items that are of importance to Human Rights Defenders. The latest issue carries e.g. interesting news on access to human rights case law from the Asian and American scene. In the future it should be possible to have on-line access to the case load of these regional systems which until now are very difficult to find. Connecting these two databases in the future will be possible, but only if they are built on common standards. Developing these is a core function of HURIDOCS as illustrated by an interview with Judith Dueck who has been involved in standard formats for almost 25 years (Judith Dueck looks back upon how it was done).
One reason to refer to this article of course the youth picture of me (from 1988) they added!
To get the HURIDOCS newsletter free every 15 days subscribe via the homepage: http://www.huridocs.org/
About the growing importance of images in the human rights world and the big challenges it poses
January 16, 2013Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, executive director of the US-based NGO Witness, wrote a post in the Huffington Post of 15 January about this fascinating topic on the occasion of Witness’ 20th anniversary. Here are some quotes before making a more critical comment:
“Twenty years ago, WITNESS was created because a world with many cameras — a world “where the eyes of the world are opened to human rights” — did not yet exist, a big bold vision at the time. Today, building on two decades of experience in creating tangible human rights change by exposing the truth through video, we are envisioning the next frontier: a world where video is not only ubiquitous, but has given millions the power to hold human rights abusers accountable, to deliver justice and to transform the human rights landscape.”….”So in 2013 and beyond, we are committed to building “video-for-change” communities, supporting networks of human rights defenders, from communities fighting forced evictions in Brazil to youth in the U.S. campaigning to protect the environment.”
In 2012, Witness launched the Human Rights Channel in partnership with YouTube and Storyful to ensure that important human rights stories are seen and contextualized. “We are committing in 2013 and beyond to take on the systems. The technology companies that run the platforms must create more human rights friendly spaces for all of us. And we decided to focus on the international legal systems to improve the understanding of how to authenticate citizen media to hold perpetrators of abuse accountable. We are working to achieve this vision by partnering and sharing in order to meet the challenge in front of us. We’ll join forces with technology mavens and mobile developers, with courageous human rights defenders worldwide, with brave bloggers, with witnessing citizens, with peer networks and effective organizations.”
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Witness has indeed greatly advanced the use of images in the struggle for human rights and its future plans are daunting. What is missing – understandably in a piece that celebrates the achievement of a group’s anniversary – is the wider picture of what the human rights movement is doing with images. From the visualization of human rights defenders (the Martin Ennals Award, Front Line Defenders, Rights Livelihood Awards, Tulip Award, Civil Rights Defenders, HRF to mention just some who regularly make film portraits and/or stream their proceedings), the production of films on HRDs (e.g. True Heroes foundation), the systematization of access to images (e.g. by HURIDOCS) and the showing of films by a myriad of human rights film festivals (HRW, AI, Movies that Matter, and some 30 others). This modest blog alone has made some 60 references to the use of film images for human rights, many by Witness and the organizations mentioned above.
I mentioning this not because of ‘fairness’ in the sense that others need to be mentioned also, but because the full scope of the challenges ahead needs to be seen and addressed. Human rights images face the same problems as documentation: (1) information overload; (2) finding the most relevant information (even more daunting for images as searching directly on images is still far away); (3) authenticity and veracity; (4) ensuring quantity and quality of dissemination (what goes ‘viral’ is not necessarily what serves human rights) and (5) protecting of sources and participants (have the persons in the film given informed consent?). And I am sure there are quite a few other important issues.
So when the executive director of Witness states that it excites her “that we, together with so many allies, are taking the challenge for the future head on“, one must hope that it includes all those who can contribute to her vision of a world ” where many, many more citizens and human rights defenders have access to knowledge, skills and tools enabling them to create compelling, trustable videos and to make sure that their video is acted upon and human rights change happens.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/witness/human-rights-2013_b_2475221.html
Follow Witness on Twitter: www.twitter.com/witnessorg see its annual report: annual report
HURIDOCS exists 30 years: my interview now on line
November 30, 2012
Hans Thoolen talks about the excitement of founding HURIDOCS, why the human rights community nowadays resembles a church with too many priests (and too few believers) and what made Latin American human rights defenders embrace technology before everyone else. Looking back at decades of involvement in human rights work, he also sketches out his idea of a multimedia platform that gives human rights defenders the space to inspire others.
What was the most exciting idea about founding HURIDOCS?
It started for me and the others at this conference in 1979 near Paris. During this conference we sensed there was space for better cooperation among NGOs, especially with new technology. Mind you: this was 1979, well before the internet, and information technology was hardly used. Our idea was to somewhere, somehow seek some level of agreement among NGOs – or at least to create the tools with which working together would be possible in the future.
in 1982 Quito with Jose Antonio Viera de Gallo from Chile
Hans Thoolen (second from right) at the Quito conference in Spring 1982, the most important conference before HURIDOCS was officially founded a few months later.
How did you move on from there?
That idea survived the meeting and there was some money left over from the Ford Foundation and that was used to have informal consultations. So for a few years, Martin Ennals, who had just stepped down as secretary-general of Amnesty International, Friederike Knabe, Laurie Wiseberg, Bjorn Stormorken and myself (working for the International Commission of Jurists) were the people who worked on the follow-up. We had meetings in London, Brussels, Oslo and Geneva and we were asking NGOs what they thought of the potential of information technology and testing out ideas on information exchange.
That slowly lead to the first big conference, in Quito, Ecuador, in 1982, partly because the Latinos had taken to the use of technology well before the West – in the NGO world, not in the business world, of course. This maybe was surprising, but when you thought about it, not that strange.
Why not? And how did this lead to the founding of HURIDOCS?
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and the rest you have to read yourself on:
http://www.huridocs.org/2012/11/we-were-breaking-new-ground/
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 