Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

This important on-line dialogue featured Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach from January 27 to February 2, 2010.  This dialogue featured practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organizations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation.  We looked at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively.  If you are trying to figure out the best documenting system for your work - or if you have found something that works well, please add your comments to this dialogue to share your questions, ideas, resources and stories!

Featured resource practitioners for this dialogue include (click here for more biographical info):

• Vijaya Tripathi and Megan Price work with the Martus database developed by Benetech
• Bert Verstappen and Daniel D'Esposito work on the OpenEvSys database developed by HURIDOCS
• Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project
• Jorge Villagran and Sofia Espinosa of the Guatemalan National Police Archive Team
• Patrick J. Pierce,  head of the International Center for Transitional Justice - Burma Program
• Oleg Burlaca, utilizes HURIDOCS methodology and working on websites for World Organisation Against Torture and SOVA Center for Information and Analysis
• Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke University and Seth Shaw, Duke's Libraries' Electronic Records Archivist
• Jana Asher, M.S., is the Executive Director of StatAid
• Agnieszka Raczynska of Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos, Mexico
• Daniel Rothenberg is the Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) at DePaul University College of Law

Main Themes

Please add your comments beneath these main themes by replying to their corresponding comments in the dialogue:

• What is documentation?
• How to determine what kinds of information to collect?
• What are the ways to acquire, store & organize information?
• What are the purposes of documentation?
• What are the risks, challenges & opportunities of documentation work?

Summary of the Documenting Violations Dialogue

In the dialogue titled Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach, participants discussed the range of methods that can be used to thoroughly document human rights violations, and utilize them to motivate a response. Participants shared a myriad of powerful examples from their own work, proving the importance and vast range of impact that documentation has.

What is documentation?
Documentation is a process of strategic and systematic gathering of quantitative or qualitative data. This process consists of several activities, namely:

1. determining what information is needed and establishing means for acquiring it;
2. recording the discovered information and storing such in appropriate containers (called documents) or collecting already-existing documents containing the needed information;
3. organising the documents to make them more accessible; and
4. actually providing the documents to users who need the information.

Before starting data collection, it is important to have a concrete end goal for the data, as that will largely influence the type and scope of data collected, and determine the parameters of the collection process. Furthermore, it is essential to establish baseline data to which new data can be compared and contrasted with.

Documentation builds a strong platform for advocacy for it provides evidence that can oppose what governments or newspapers are reporting. Here is a 10-step plan on how to use documentation for human rights advocacy.

An important lesson learned is to review the impact of the documents on particular human rights efforts and store data safely.

Data Collection Software:
Two main kinds of software were mentioned throughout the dialogue – Martus and OpenEvsys. What tool for what purpose? The differences of the two documentation systems are discussed here.

Martus secures your data by encrypting it on your computer and (if you choose to) automatically backing it up to remote, dedicated secure servers around the world. If your computer is lost, destroyed or stolen, you can retrieve your information from the remote servers. Martus is a very good tool for use in countries with very repressive regimes, where you and your sources can get into serious trouble if your data is found.

OpenEvsys can be used both to collect and organize stories, but also to provide "who did what to whom" quantitative analysis of the violations in these stories: how many acts of torture by military in X province, what is the gender breakdown of the victims, etc.OpenEvsys is different, in that you can also record in as much detail as needed what happens inside these stories. You can record violations, link them to the victims, and the perpetrators, and the sources.  It is a fully relational system, so you only enter perpetrator X once, and then you link perpetrator to all the acts that he or she has committed, in all your stories, and then you can get a "bio" of all the acts that perpetrator has committed.

Compiling Different Documents
Although different organizations will use different software, the contents of their documentation are likely related. Advocacy efforts benefit by compiling data and creating a bigger picture of human rights violations.
Metadata , or simply “data about data,” is a set of structured data or content types that characterize an information object. Metadata can be used to compile data from multiple databases, thus creating a larger document. Developing a useful metadata system for the human rights community could have tremendous impact for the human rights community for it would allow drawing connections between different data sets and discover greater patterns of abuse.

What data can be collected?

• violations
• testimonies – For example, the Iraq History Project collected thousands of testimonies documenting the destructive impact of political violence under the Saddam Hussein regime.
• monitoring indicators – particularly helpful for discrimination, ongoing oppression
• legal investigations & researching government data - archives of repressive regimes may contain important information. For example, the Guatemala Archive Project revealed that many government-supported atrocities were well documented in their own archives.
• scanning media
• documenting HR interventions
• anthropological research
• ecological studies
• realtime data - for example, a dynamic realtime geo-map of the post-election situation in Kenya and a range of projects on the use of mobile technology can be found here.

Qualitative or quantitative research?
A big challenge in the field of documentation is whether to rely on quantitative or qualitative data. Both are important, quantitative data draw the big picture for us and qualitative data supply the emotive, social, and political aspects of a person's experience.  A related question – How structured should documentation be? - poses a challenge to field research. Narrowly defined questionnaires will likely omit a large portion of the person's experience, whereas powerful individual testimonies are difficult to summarize into big reports that ought to quantify impact. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are discussed here.

Documenting civil and political & economic, social, and cultural rights
Some of the traditional approaches (such as documenting violations) have been used primarily in the case of civil and political rights. However, the human rights community is strengthening its focus on the documentation of economic, social and cultural rights. Three broad categories of approaches to ESC were mentioned in the dialogue:

• state violations resulting from government actions, policies, and legislation.
• violations related to patterns of discrimination.
• violations related to the state’s failure to fulfill minimum core obligations of enumerated rights.

Challenges

• when released, some data can be harmful to the very individuals it aims to protect
• accuracy – it is important to be aware of our biases as those who collect documents, “record the story not your interpretation of the story.”
• activist vs. scientists – NGO documentation is sometimes not trusted by scientists. Cooperation between experts and activists is key to solid documentation
• security -  Recognizing the need of organizations to combine their data to create greater impact, it is all the more important to ensure a secure transfer and storage of data that does not put people (both those documented and documenting) at risk

Resources

• Protection manual for HR defenders  - tactics to reduce the risks that those who document HR violations face
• Information cycles in HR organizations - graphic representation
• Presentation on "Digital Democracy" - engaging technology at the local level to produce an international response
• Planning a large scale documentation project - "Who did What to Whom?" is a detailed resource describing the different aspects of a human rights campaign achieved through documentation.
• Core Concepts in Data Analysis
• Statistics Manual for Human Rights Research
• Methods, tools and framework in HR documentation - a set of tools developed by Metagora