In 2025, the human rights sector faced extraordinary pressure. Across the world, civic space continued to shrink, funding landscapes shifted, and the communities that defenders serve faced mounting threats. Yet people, organisations, and movements chose to stay together, reinforce what matters, and keep the threads of accountability intact.
This year’s annual report is built around that idea. Civil society is a fabric, held together not by any single institution but by the many hands that choose to show up, stitch by stitch, in pursuit of justice. HURIDOCS’ role is to strengthen that fabric, through three interconnected areas of work:
Partnerships: Patchwork of purpose
Working alongside human rights defenders and civil society organisations worldwide to co-build the tools and systems they need.
Technology: Loom of innovation
Building open, accessible tools designed to outlast the moment, helping changemakers collect, protect, and make sense of information.
Research: Threads of learning
Shaping wider conversations on documentation, technology, and justice through thought leadership and active engagement with academic and practitioner communities.
HURIDOCS remained committed to strengthening that fabric in 2025, supporting 47 projects across 38 countries to ensure that documentation work could continue, evidence could be preserved, and the pursuit of justice would not be interrupted.
“Civil society is a quilt. Organisations are not isolated pieces. People move between them, ideas travel, partnerships form, and when one part of the fabric wears thin, others help mend it. The strength of civil society has never come from any one institution. It comes from the fabric we create together.”
— Danna Ingleton, HURIDOCS Executive Director
Partnerships: Patchwork of purpose
HURIDOCS supported 47 projects across 38 countries, from transitional justice in the Somali Region of Ethiopia to civil liberties monitoring in Indonesia, from death penalty defence across Asia to economic, social and cultural rights advocacy in Türkiye. Each partnership was shaped by the needs, expertise, and context of the communities our partners serve, ranging from long-term collaborations to rapid responses to crisis documentation needs.
The HURIDOCS Documentation Fund
Now in its third year, the Documentation Fund provided pro bono or subsidised support to 18 projects across a wide range of human rights, environmental, and humanitarian contexts, ensuring that under-resourced defenders could access the tools and expertise they need to document safely and effectively.
Technology: Loom of innovation
In 2025, Uwazi became faster, smarter, and more resilient. When a series of sophisticated distributed denial-of-service attacks disrupted traffic to a number of public instances early in the year, the team responded swiftly and emerged stronger. Five new machine learning capabilities were developed, reducing the manual burden of documentation work and enabling partners to process complex information with greater speed and accuracy. A comprehensive redesign of the user interface and a foundational data layer upgrade are well underway, making Uwazi more powerful and more intuitive than ever.
Research: Threads of learning
For over four decades, HURIDOCS has shaped wider conversations on documentation, technology, and justice. We hosted Dr Tomiwa Ilori as part of the OTF Information Controls Fellowship Program, culminating in a joint research report on digital security tools for human rights defenders in Sub-Saharan Africa. We also contributed to academic initiatives, delivered guest lectures, and participated in international forums, reinforcing our role as a thought leader and field shaper in global discussions on human rights documentation.
Finances: Weave of support
HURIDOCS continued to navigate a complex funding landscape in 2025, strengthening existing partnerships and exploring new avenues for collaboration. We remain deeply grateful to our donors and supporters whose commitment made this work possible.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 