Dans le domaine des droits humains, je pense que la documentation fait référence à la collecte des inforamtions relatives aux violations en vue d'aider les victimes dans les procédures de demande de réparation.

De mon point de vue, la documentation sert à argumenter le plaidoyer de même qu'elle nourrit la recherche.

 La doumentation des violations de droits humains peut surtout être utile dans le contexte de l'Afrique subsaharienne où les populations les plus démunies, plus exposées à ces violations, sont en majeur partie des personnes anaphabètes, n'ayant pas la culture de l'écriture. D'où la complexité aussi de la documentation pour les organisations de défense des droits humains 

What do we mean when we talk about human rights documentation? 

An excellent question.  Many of the featured practitioners here are documenting violations against political and civil rights.  We create a record--hopefully a permanent record--of experiences of individuals who have survived violations of their right to life, to peaceful assembly, to security of person.  In other words, we document violations of the following types:  extrajudicial killings, torture, physical assault, sexual assault, property damage, destruction or theft, forced displacement, and forced consumption (typically of items that are nonedible or taboo, or forced overconsumption).  In some cases that record is qualitative in nature; for example, the record might be a story, recorded verbatim, told by a survivor of the abuse.  Or it might have come to us in the form of a newspaper report or official document.  In some cases that record is quantitative in nature; it has come from a random sample survey or from the coding of qualitative information. 

Both quantitative and qualitative documentation are useful; I like to think of them as "the forest" and "the trees."  The quantitative information is akin to the forest, or an aerial snapshot of the big picture.  The qualitative information is akin to the trees, or a picture of an individual tree.  From the picture of the individual tree, you can see all of the details of the tree -- the pattern of the bark, the knotholes -- just like from qualitative information, you can learn the details of an individual's human rights violations experience.  From the picture of the forest, you can't see details, but you get a different, equally important overview of the whole group of trees -- just like from quantitative information, you get a "snapshot" of what happened and the prevalence/intensity of the violations.  I believe that the best overall picture of mass human rights violations is given by combining the forest and the trees--in other words, documenting what happened via both quantitative and qualitative information. 

Going back to the types of human rights violations, there are violations against rights other than civil and political that we must turn our attention to in the future--I am thinking of violations of economic, social, and cultural rights, such as the right to food, water, shelter, a means of employment, medical care, and education.  Yes, these types of violations are often harder to document, but then again, there are some clear-cut cases.  Sometimes E/S/C rights violations are interwoven with P/C right violations.  For example, if forced displacement results in a lack of access to food and water, then both a P/C violation and an E/S/C violation have occurred.  As an example of a purely E/S/C violation, consider the case of a government which restricts the movement of humanitarian workers attempting to bring food aid to a population suffering a famine.

How do we, as practioners, best document such violations?  I believe this is an open question that deserves some debate and a great deal of research.  First, we must agree that it is possible to document violations of this type.  Much work has been done by the human rights community on defining E/S/C rights and the violation of those rights -- it is time to translate those definitions into documentation practices.

One question that WITNESS (www.witness.org) is wrestling with in terms of documentation is how to understand burgeoning amounts of citizen documentation that are not gathered through formal human rights documentation processes. Does text/images/testimony need to have been conceptualized as 'human rights documentation' in order for it to be useful to human rights work? This relates very closely to the real-time dilemmas that I also see emerging in other threads.

This question arises particularly in the light of the increasing amount of visual documentation (primarily of civil and political rights violations, e.g Iran, Honduras etc, but also including testimony-based documentation around ESC rights) that is being circulated online and because of more and more ubiquitous cameras on cell-phones and the like.This kind of visual documentation was already fairly poorly assimilated into human rights documentation strategies (if better incorporated into mobilization and advocacy strateiges), because of the slippery nature of its documentation value (how do we understand pov, whats in and out of frame etc) and the speed, pace and volume of creation of a/v material is outpacing much of the human rights community's capacity to relate to it. 

If we assume that in five, ten years time, perhaps 90% of visual documentation of human rights violations will have been gathered outside of the formal human rights infrastructure, how do we make sure that this citizen documentation is of value to more formal documentation/advocacy processes (which will continue to be important for securing protection and redress) both in real-time and after the fact?

In preparation for this dialogue, I have come across many great resources to help us identify what documentation is, and how it relates to human rights.

• 'Who Did What to Whom? Planning and Implementing a Large Scale Human Rights Data Project' by Patrick Ball (AAAS)

In chapter 1.1 Purpose and definition of an information management system, Patrick explains, "As you can see from the preceding examples, the term 'information management system' implies more than a computer database. Rather, it suggests an integrated system through which an organization collects data, organizes it, puts it somewhere, and then analyzes it. A good paper filing system is always an important component of the system, whether or not an organization uses computers. Good information management can be done without computers. We talk of an information management system in order to highlight the whole process by which an organization obtains and analyzes information." Four steps of an information management system:

In chapter 1.2 Why use a formal system for information management?, Patrick explains,
"The information management system gives the organization a way to accumulate many individuals' systematic efforts. Thus the organization's memory can slowly grow to be greater than any of its member's memories." An information management system, if done correctly, is also important for human rights work in that it helps us to see relationships between events - and trends.

• 'What is Documentation' by Manuel Guzman and Bert Verstappen (HURIDOCS)

This document points out right away that 'documentation' means different things to different people. Some see 'documentation' as the collection of documents (like a documentation centre). Others think of 'documentation' as the "act of recording the results of an investigation, inquiry, research or similar activity." These two types of 'documentation' can be considered: library-type of documentation (collection of docs) and the documentation of events (recording info on ongoing or recent events).

Documentation is a process consisting 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.

Documentation could also mean a specific part of this process. Thus, documentation could refer to the act of recording information, or the act of collecting and organising documents. [taken from 'What is Documentation']

• The Relationship between Information and Human Rights, a presentation given by Judith Dueck (HURIDOCS)

Judith Dueck, the Vice-President of HURIDOCS, gave a presentation on human rights documentation in 2009 at the Soul of the New Machine conference in Berkeley, California. This is a link to a 5 minute introduction to the growth of the human rights documentation field with a few great personal stories.

With so much information, and so little resources, where does a human rights organization start when trying to determine what kinds of information they should collect? 

I did a little homework and found some good information in the 'What is Documentation' guide. The guide lists four aspects of determing what kind of info to collect:

• users’ needs analysis - Identify the immediate users (lawyers, medical officers, other service providers, activists, etc) and anticipate what information they need.
• determination of the possible sources of information - Examples:
  
  • People who played roles in the event, such as victims, witnesses and perpetrators
  • Government officials such as military officers or prison officials
  • Other people who could provide background information, such as colleagues of the victim
  • The actual sites of the events
  • Government offices such as statistical offices
  • Records kept in morgues, hospitals, prisons, and other facilities
• selection - "The primary criterion in deciding what information and documents are relevant is the purpose formulated for the fact-finding activity."
• deciding how to acquire the information or documents needed - the planning of a fact-finding activity or deciding how to acquire documents (purchase, gift or exchange)

Can you share any examples of what this process looks like? This seems pretty straight-forward, but I am sure it is not as easy as it seems...

With the increased implementations of crisis mapping tools, we are seeing the emergency of a "Realtime" acquisition and analysis of data about human rights violations. Rather than focus on detective research after the fact, those interested in protecting populations at risk must now move into more of a operational center model of tracking, vetting, organizing and disseminating data as it is happening, with the dual goal of getting to the truth of what is happening at that moment, while also doing what you can to stop a tragedy before it can escalate.

Obviously, realtime tools will not always be applicable for every case, especially with long term violations related to the environment, sexual crimes or  corruption. 

I don't want to get into a discussion of the quality of this new type of data collection model here, more I just want to represent that this new model exists, whether we like it or not, and all of the questions asked in this thread, must also take into account the fact that people who are suffering violations may be reporting about them directly, in 140 character chunks, with questionable authenticity and quality. What we are still figuring out is, how and when to respond to this, and where does it fit within all of the other tools which exist.

Since I'm very new to human rights domain (since August 2009), I've decided to lurk around before making a post. 

As pointed out, there are 3 steps:

1. acquiring information (we need to answer the question: What are human rights violations(HRV), what is documentation etc)
2. storing information into computer system (which methodology?)
3. using the information (quantitative: analytics, heatmaps, geomaping etc, and qualitative: point out relationships, patterns, trends)

If we summarize what have been said today, almost all messages are about the Acquiring stage. I completely agree that it's the most important step and it's very hard to create a successfull software product without having a background in human rights violations. HRV is not accounting and even if you (as an IT developer) have this background, it's hard build a flexible product because the requirements may be fuzzy. 

What I'd like to see is an online aggregation facility of HRV projects. A project is composed of: problem statement, a list of tools that were used, the challenges, the tradeoffs and some use cases. A use case shows a specific solution to a specific problem, for example: how the  'who did what to whom' methodology was used to document a specific event. The idea behind such a resource is to have a complete list of available software for the HRV domain and what kind of problems these software is solving and how.

When Jana Asher said about "quantitative and qualitative documentation", I recall the idea to use OpenCalais to automatically extract “who, what, where and when.” information out of articles published on OMCT. Almost all articles on the OMCT website is about HRV. The fact that the results of applying the 'who did what to whom' methodology is similar to what OpenCalais can do, what if we automatically process a big dataset (a collection of articles) and build a database of entities and relationships ?! For example, we can extract the names of the persons (and eventually their age) that were mentioned in an article, how these persons connect (Person1 killed Person2), what actions have been commited against a person etc, the location of the event etc etc. Here is the result of processing this page using Calais Viewer. You may read how Calais works and an article about OpenCalais. I fully understand that such approach may not yield very accurate data, but it can help a lot if you quickly want to see the "forest, or an aerial snapshot of the big picture" as Jana said. This might be a complementary tool along with OpenEvSys from HURIDOCS for example.

One of the tools available for those documenting human rights is Martus (Greek for ‘witness’), a free and open source secure information management tool developed by the Benetech Human Rights Program .
We developed Martus because after years of working on human rights data analysis projects, we felt there was a need for an easy-to-use encryption tool as well as an information management solution for the human rights community. We designed Martus based on feedback from our project partners, and since 2003 have provided Martus outreach and support to users around the world, and continued releasing new versions of Martus.

Here’s how it works:

• 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.

• You can organize your information in a customizable format (records are called ‘bulletins’ in Martus), and you can manage the bulletins with searching and reporting functionalities.

• You can securely share information with colleagues and partners.

• You can ‘export’ the information if you want to use it in another tool for any reason.

• Martus is available in several languages, including Arabic, Burmese, Spanish, Russian, Nepali, French, Farsi/Dari, and Thai.

Martus is used by organizations around the world to document human rights abuses, protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses.

You can read more about Martus and download the software here

• The Martus overview
• The Martus demo
• The Martus download page

Martus is just one of the resources available, however, and it’s not necessarily right for every individual or every organization. We always encourage people to try out the demo and think through their project needs and resources when they are considering whether to use Martus for their information management project. A given organization’s information management and security needs may well change over its lifetime as well, so that Martus may be right for it when it starts out but not a few years down the road – or vice versa. We’re always available to advise during the process of deciding what the correct tool is.

One of the challenges we face in documenting human rights violations in Burma has to do with interview methodology. We have been training fieldworkers for a few years, and we consistently face the question of how structured the interviews they conduct should be.

On the "highly-structured" end of the spectrum is a questionairre. The advantage of this appoach is that all the fieldworkers are gathering almost the same sets of data and so analyzing the responses across various interviews is made easier. This approach is also helpful for fieldworkers who do not have a lot of confidence or experience - they have very specific guidelines to follow. The biggest downside as I see it is that it puts the people being interviewed in a box and removes their power during the interview to talk about what they believe is important. And no matter how well designed a questionairre is, it may not fully take into account the reality of a violent situation.

On the other end of the spectrum is an unstructured interview. Using this methodology, the interviewer may set the general parameters of the interview and then turn over the direction of the interview to the person telling his or her story. I have used this methodology in some interviews about attitudes toward peace and justice. I ask the interviewee to tell me about their life, starting with biographical information and childhood experience. As they go through the various stages of their life, I ask for more detail about the parts that I am most interested in (the violence they have suffered and their resistence, coping, resilience that followed in response). The last question I ask is about what the interviewee thinks should happen to the person responsible for their suffering and what they want/need as a survivor in order to feel any satisfaction.

For the human rights documentation work that is linked to advocacy (to impact countries' foreign policies or UN actions on Burma) we tend to encourage a semi-structured methodology, between these two ends of the spectrum. Fieldworkers ask about specific incidents that they are interested in (e.g. with IDP's who have recently been forced off of their land). They are trained in the "essential elements" of the 15 categories of human rights violations that their network focuses on, and then ask who, what, when, where, how, why (and how do you know) for each element of the violation. So for forced relocation, the four essential elements are (1) removal from one's home or land, (2) arbitrary nature of the removal, (3) coercion or lack of consent, and (4) state action. The interview guidelines offer suggestions for the questions to ask to establish each violation:

1. Establishing the relocation

• Who was relocated?
• What happened?
• When did the incident occur?
• Where were people relocated from/to?
• How many others were relocated?
• How do you know what happened?

2. Establishing that the relocation was arbitrary

• What led to the relocation?
• What was the reason given for the relocation?
• What opportunity was there to challenge the relocation?
• How was the relocation process implemented?
• How do you know this information?

3. Establishing that the relocation was involuntary

• Who ordered you to leave?
• What do you think would have happened if you refused to leave?
• Why did you leave?
• Did you want to leave? Why or why not?
• Were you threatened? How? By whom?

4. Establishing state action

• Who carried out the relocation? Who ordered it? Who knew about it? Who assisted in it?
• Did you report the incident? Why or why not?
• What did the state do to prevent or respond to the incident?
• How do you know this information?

The guidelines for all 15 categories of human rights violations follow a similar pattern, so that at the end of a one-week training, (ideally) the fieldworkers do not need to go through the list of questions above - they flow logically. We are currently working on a "fieldworkers pocket guide" that will include the essential elements for each of the 15 violations and the questions needed to establish each violation.

The overall idea with this methodology is to allow the interviewee to tell her or his story, and to kick into this more structured methodology when a violation is mentioned as part of the story. We're still rolling out this methodology through trainings and developing a curriculum to increase consistency across all the fieldworkers involved in the network. (See the link above for more information and to link to the documentation manuals developed by the Network for Human Rights Documentation - Burma).

I would be very interested to learn about how others have addressed this challenge, determined what interview methodology is best, etc. I'm also interested in understanding more about how the data gathered is going to be used impacts decisions about the collection methodology. And while I'm at it - also interested in training materials for fieldworkers. 

I'd like to know if anyone can share experience with alternative methods ot social research to the traditional documentation of events/cases/incidents...

For example, using surveys, focus groups... but in the context of human rightsdocumentation.

And what useful manuals on social research methods should we read? I found this free online primer, and I like it a lot, but there must be others.

Dear colleagues:

These discussions are very interesting.

I’m not sure if what I will post now is useful, but I decided to share with all of you a brief overview of a project that I have run here at the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) of the DePaul University College of Law. It is called the Iraq History Project (IHP). We documented the profoundly destructive impact of political violence under the regime of Saddam Hussein and following the US-led invasion by gathering thousands of testimonies with a methodology that plays off of many issues raised here.

Over the past six and a half years, studies show that 100,000 to 800,000 Iraqis have been killed and the United Nations estimates that one out of every six Iraqis have fled their home because of violence, creating one of the world’s most significant refugee and displacement crises. All of this has occurred in a country that suffered devastating losses over three decades of authoritarian rule in which the Ba’ath Party government killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and forced the entire nation to live under a state of constant surveillance and brutal repression.
The IHP has collected 8,911 testimonies representing over 55,000 pages of personal narratives recounting the individual experience of torture, massacres, assassinations, rape, kidnapping, disappearances and other violations.
The goal of the project is to provide Iraqis with an opportunity to talk about their experiences and thereby document the truth of political violence while placing a human face on the suffering of the Iraqi people. In this way, the project is similar to truth commissions in South Africa, Guatemala, Peru and elsewhere as well as to projects like the Shoah Foundation’s database of Holocaust testimonies and the REMHI project in Guatemala (particularly since these initiatives were not officially sanctioned processes like truth commissions).
The project has three main objectives: documenting past and present violations by collecting large numbers of testimonies from around the country; analyzing this material to reveal patterns of violence and repression; and, encouraging the development of domestic and international policies to assist victims through reparations, memorialization, education and national reconciliation. The project seeks to contribute to an improved understanding of the scope, impact and severity of systematic political violence over the past four decades in Iraq and to aid a broad social process of transitional justice, national reconciliation and reconstruction.

Here is an overview of the IHP methodology:

For the IHP, we designed qualitative methodology based on a review of similar large scale human rights projects, such as truth commissions. The project trained an all-Iraqi team of over 100 interviewers who worked throughout the country speaking with nearly nine thousand Iraqis representing the country’s diverse ethnic/religious population.

The interviews were carefully recorded by hand and then transmitted to a central office where they were entered into a secure and searchable database using Martus. Some of this material was transferred to a secondary analytic database using Access and SPSS.

The quality of the material gathered relies to a large degree on the skills and training of the IHP interviewers. Interviewers were selected to represent diversity of gender and religious/ethnic background. They ranged in age and professional background and included physicians, professors, lawyers, and journalists.

Interviewers used social networks, victims’ organizations, and local non-governmental organizations to identify and contact potential interviewees. Interviewers were paired with interview subjects in a manner that maximized their comfort and encouraged the collection of detailed testimonies. For example, women were interviewed by other women, Kurds by other Kurds, Assyrians by other Assyrians, etc. In addition, interviewees generally worked in the governorate or region where they live.

The interview process was designed to allow victims, their families and others to talk openly about their experiences in a manner that was both personally meaningful and useful for gathering material on specific violations and broad patterns of abuse. Since it is difficult for many victims to discuss their experiences of past repression, interviewers devoted special attention to approaching interviewees with kindness, respect and patience. Interviews typically lasted many hours and, in some cases, interviews took place over several meetings.

The IHP interviewers arrived at a designated location to meet interviewees. They provided the interviewee with a clear overview of the project and would then seek to establish a positive, trusting relationship. Because it is often emotionally difficult and even traumatic for people to discuss their experiences of political violence and repression, interviewers were trained to approach interviewees with great care.

Interviewers explained that the basic goal of the project was to prepare an account of political repression in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein and after the U.S. led invasion through the personal stories of victims and their families. The interviewers described how these testimonies are gathered from victims and their families all over the country and that the material is stored in a database and that some of the results are to be published in various media with the goal of informing the Iraqi people about the suffering caused by the prior regime and in the past six and a half years. Interviewers sometimes discussed the possible use of the material in courses in schools and universities as well as the hope that the project might encourage the government to create programs to address victims’ needs.

We have presented the material gathered in books, newspaper inserts and on call-in radio programs in Arabic and Kurdish that have been heard by an estimated audience of over 500,000 Iraqis.

Interviewers highlighted the fact that participation was entirely voluntary and that there were no immediate financial or material benefits of being interviewed. Interviewers explained that interviewees should only participate if they were interested in contributing their story to the larger collection of testimonies about past political violence in Iraq. Interviewers then explained that they would answer any questions potential interviewees may have. They tried to ensure that interviewees had as clear an understanding as possible of the project. Interestingly, a number of interviewees later told our team that they were pleased that the project was honest in offering no direct benefits for participation. This was especially true for victims in places like Halabja where many prior interviews have been conducted, often alongside substantial promises of aid and assistance.

The interview methodology began by allowing the interviewee to speak openly about his or her experiences. Interviewers asked interviewees to tell their story in an unstructured manner. The IHP methodology allowed interviewees to talk about their experiences of past human rights violations in the way that is personally meaningful. Interviewers worked in a focused, yet informal manner, listening closely to the stories presented and carefully recording the testimonies by hand. They would write down everything the interviewee said in a word-for-word manner, interrupting the narrative only when absolutely necessary or to slow the process down to make sure all of what was said is accurately recorded.

Interviewers were encouraged to respect the fact that every person has their own way of telling their story. The methodology focused on the specific facts of each person’s story as well as the unique ways in which each interviewee chose to tell their own story. Interviewers were trained to work with each interviewee as an individual and to help victims feel as comfortable as possible while discussing these difficult and traumatic issues.

After the interviewee finished their story with minimal questions and prompting (a process that often took hours), the interviewers began asking questions. These questions followed the testimony as it has been recorded and focused on clarifying data, such as names, dates, and other relevant information. The interviewer might ask questions about dates, times, as well as how a particular event occurred or how a series of violations progressed. The interviewer might also seek clarification on feelings, descriptions, witnesses, information on perpetrators and anything that seemed necessary to fully understand the testimony. Interviewers would then mark down each element of additional information, whether a specific fact or a lengthy description, as well as any new elements of the testimony that arose from these questions.

After completing that stage, the interviewer would then read the testimony slowly, line by line, to the interviewee, asking him or her to correct or clarify any aspect of the narrative that they wanted changed. The purpose of that stage is to ensure that the interviewee fully accepted the testimony in terms of its accuracy, style and tone as a reflection of their personal experience. In this way, each interviewee approved the text of his or her testimony.

Then, the IHP staff would thank the interviewee and return home with the relevant paper records from the interview. Each interviewer would then prepare a clean version of the testimony using set guidelines. All original paper and notes would be destroyed. The final testimony material would be coded for safety and then transferred to the main office for review and entry into the project database.

The general data on each interviewee as well as the testimony would then be entered into the Martus database by staff working under the supervision of the database manager. The database encrypted the identifying information and narratives which are stored on a server located outside of the country to protect material from tampering, theft, or accidental damage. All paper records were destroyed after being entered into the database, which is password protected and can only be accessed by authorized staff.

Following the data entry, we engaged in selective analysis of material based on specific violations, historical events and other issues.

We worked closely with colleagues all over the world on this project, including excellent assistance from Benetech.

This is an ongoing project and we will post a revised website in Arabic, English and Kurdish shortly (www.iqhp.org).

I am planning to draft a detailed review of the methodology and to make available all of our training materials on how to conduct interviews, etc.

Any comments?

Burmese human rights groups collect almost all of their data by conducting interviews with people who have witnessed or suffered human rights violations. In looking at comparative examples, I am consistently surprised and baffled by the data that has emerged from the files of repressive regimes.

I have visited the Guatemalan Police Archives (just after the files were discovered) and learned good lessons on how to preserve and organize that kind of material from experts at the Iraq Memory Foundation. The Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation and Research Center is now endeavoring to take on a similar project. I think there are a lot of questions to ask about those methodologies for organizing and preserving these kinds of data, but because in Burma we do not yet have access to those files, I have a different question for any of you who have worked on such project. Based on what you have found, why do repressive regimes preserve their files? And how can our knowledge of their motivations help us in accessing and understanding the data?

I believe the intended end use of the data can greatly influence how the data should be collected.

If the end use is to prove the existence of human rights violations, document those violations for historical or legislative purposes, to inform the work of a truth and reconciliation commission, or to be used in a trial of a war criminal, then the documentation efforts are likely to be scrutinized so thoroughly that any small error -- whether it really has an impact on the conveyance of the truth of the human rights abuses or not  -- could lead to a disaster (i.e., the war criminal being found innocent, the TRC being discredited, and so on).

If the end use is to provide reparations and/or humanitarian aid, then that type of overly-intense scrutiny might not be present.  On the other hand, mistakes would still potentially be disastrous, if they led to aid or assistance being inappropriately distributed.  

In either case, you want data to be as high quality as possible.  For qualitative methods, rigorous methodology that ensures (as much as possible) that key information is collected (e.g., who, what, when, where, etc.) is desired.  For quantitative methods, random sample surveys, when possible, are preferable to non-random data, although care must be taken to ensure the random sample survey is implemented well.

Researchers/practitioners that focus on human rights tend to be more oriented towards data collection for the former purposes -- but the latter purposes are perhaps of more interest to those that experienced past violations.  As such, we should be careful to collect data in such as way as they can be used to inform reparations/assistance whenever possible, even if that isn't our mandate.

Documentation by itself can be a process as simple as the accumulation of sources (books, newspapers, testimonies, images, etc.)
Among the human rights community, (at least in our countries) the following tends to be a habit: taking a picture of everything, collecting magazine articles, storing newspapers, books, official documents...
This information gathering is valuable, taking under consideration that it can be organized afterwards for future analysis. In our experience, we stumbled upon the need to have a minimal identification and classification of the info so that it could be of immediate and accurate use. In our day to day experience, we've learned that investigators prefer using secondary information rather that the primary source.
Internal investigators at the National Police Archive have had to do enormous efforts to get quality reports done based on that primary source. Better luck have had the external investigators who've used the organized information system created during the archival-investigative process of the Archive recovery.
What has been your experience?

I am interested in thinking through some of the assumptions we make, as human rights practitioners, about the benefits of testimony as a form human rights documentation. In what circumstances is it inappropriate or harmful for people to talk about the violence they witnessed or themselves suffered?

Security plays an important role, for example, if the story a person tells implicates someone who is still a threat to her or him. Some of the best writing I've seen about this issue is by Kimberly Theidon, an anthropologist at Harvard. See this link to her January 2007 Journal of Human Rights article, Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War (particularly pages 459-464, about the problems of safety in telling one's stories.)

There is also the question of whether talking about one's suffering is "healing" or "redemptive." Rosalind Shaw, a professor at Tufts University, has done some interesting work on this issue in the context of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, examining how those assumptions have come to appear natural and universal, and the ways they do not ring true in Sierra Leone. See this link to her paper for USIP and this link for an abstract in the International Journal of Transitional Justice.

With our HR documentation work in FIji we face quite a lot of challenges.  One of the main ones is in this political climate of persecution, censorship and threats, access to information is so limited.  It is very difficult to obtain information from survivors and witnesses on violations and with the censorship and control over the media it proves even more difficult.

Another  challenge we tend to face is the lack of capacity building andupskilling of human rights officers in the field esp in the documentation and analysis areas.

We see a lot of potential for online solutions, for databases or document storage solutions, as they allow sharing across geographical divides, and protect against physical attacks on premises.

But one problem is security, ie protection of sensitive information against unauthorized access. In particular the entry point to the online system via login and password.  Keyloggers or screenshot tools can be used to capture password information. This is the Achilles heel. 

Any ideas for a simple and low tech solution? Martus has the two-level solution, something you know (password) and something you have (keypair). How to implement this in an online solution?

One idea we have: a one time password system, meaning the users have their personal password, and a second password taken from a pre-printed list generated by a system. Feasible?

Another idea: to use the upcoming iPad as a means to interact with data. They are cheap and can be connected to an external keyboard. And I doubt there will be any keyloggers in the App store, and even if there were the iPad does not allow multitasking, so no spy apps in the background!

And ideas or suggestions? 

A crime occurs today; our technology documents it and generates evidence that can be immediately analyzed and disseminated. But typically (as is the case today with Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Guatemala, and many other places where communties are seeking justice for past crimes) only a long way down the line, years possibly decades later, is there is a chance for justice. Will the evidence we generate through our new documentation strategies be around to support prosecution and attempts at accountability?

I've been reading with great interest everyone's comments on the opportunities afforded by new documentation technologies, from Nathan's discussion about cell phones and PDA's that generate on-the-ground data to the software tools such as Martus and HURIDOCS that manage, organize, and help interpret that data. As an archivist working with human rights organizations to preserve legacy data, I feel we need to match the need for immediate and mobile data about human rights violations and crimes with a need for stable data structures that will survive the pace of technological obsolescence and the vagaries of post-custodial information management. Whatever technology we are using today we can be sure that we will be using new technology tomorrow, and we may all be sharing information but who is taking responsibility for its long-term survival?

A case in point: in 2006 Duke's Archive for Human Rights received the legacy collection of an NGO that worked with the International Criminal Court  to collect, catalog, and provide access to audio and video evidence of genocide and human right violations in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and other areas of the world. The NGO operated from 1993 to about 2003 and collected over 10,000 tapes and developed a robust database that contained vital information needed by prosecutors: names of witnesses, locations, date, creator, rights owners, controlled vocabulary of human rights crimes, etc. As recently as 2006 the ICC contacted Duke seeking evidence in an important prosecution - this was over a decade after the evidence had been originally generated!

The challenges: The catalog data was stored and managed in a FileMaker Pro database. Since the original creation of the database FileMaker Pro has undergone something like 5 to 7 iterations; in order to simply gain access to the data we had to come up with a strategy of migrating the data forward and migrating the software backwards a few generations - this worked but just barely. We have noted content loss and file corruption and plan on creating a more stable structure for the collection metadata. The tapes themselves are now coming close to the end of their stable life-time. The long-term solution for both preservation and access is digitizing the tapes. We estimate that digitizing ~4,000 of the tapes at the lowest acceptable codex will require about 29TB of storage and cost about $50,000 a year to maintain....forever.

Some human rights organizations are thinking about these issues today. ICTJ's recent publication Documenting Truth is a case in point, but to tackle the challenges of preserving the digital records created by new and ever-changing technologies we really need to get the people designing and using the tools today to incorporate preservation and stability into their design process. How can this happen and where do we begin? I would love to begin such a dialogue between the archives community and human rights practioners.

Hello,

A great question.  The featured resource practitioners for this dialog all have good access to technology -- that is, to Internet, computers, etc.  So what does a dialog on human rights documentation mean in a context where there are no computers -- and possible no electricity -- and no cell phones, etc.?  

Here we need to make a distinction between tools and technology.  Several posts in this dialog are about basic paper-based tools -- for example, what type of questionnaire/statement form should be used when recording data collected about human rights violations.  

When I'm working in the field with documenters/interviewers that only have access to paper and pencil, I try to relay the following ideas.  In doing so, I try to provide the local practitioners with tools -- questionnaire formats, skills in interviewering, and knowledge of best practices -- that allow them to collect the highest quality data possible.

1. Record the story, not your interpretation of the story.  The job of the interviewer is to make sure the details of the story are transmitted accurately.  To do that well often requires training on how to not lead the respondent to a particular answer/statement, how to appear empathetic and build rapport no matter what the interviewers personal feeling are about the event, and so on.  There are interviewer-training techniques that are appropriate (when tailored) for any culture/language.  For example, making interviewers aware of what their body language says and how their voice control affects the person being interviewed can affect how well information is collected.

2. Make a safe space for the respondent. The respondent might have a story to tell that is very frightening to relay -- for example, women that have experienced sexual abuses are blamed for the abuse in some cultures, making it very difficult for them to report what happened.  Interviewers can be trained in what to say, and how to say it, to make the safest environment for the respondent.

3. Make sure all the details are there.  Using a form that has spaces for particular aspects of the violation--who, what, when, where, etc.--helps interviewers make sure they get all of the pertinent pieces of information related to the violation.  

Yes, there are particular technology-based tools that are great when you have access to them.  But the very important themes that underlie the discussions here related to how to collect information that is of high quality can apply whether there is a computer handy or not.  If there is no mobile phone, use a traditional camera or tape recorded with batteries.  If those aren't available, record the information on paper.  While technology can make it easier to gather and analyze high-quality data, it is not required to do so.   And it is possible to have great technology available and still either collect bad data or analyze good data badly.  The important take-home message, I believe, has to do with understanding how to collect human rights violations data well and how to use those data appropriately.

Agnieszka -

Thanks for your post - I'd be very interested in hearing more about the database platform created by your organization.  Is it open-source software?  Is it scalable?  Is the data centralized or distributed?  Are you partnering with an organization outside Mexico to backup the system periodically?

Another point to help you sell this to your constituents:  if you can host multiple secure instances of the data in remote storage, then your data will be more likely to survive a crisis, whether this be a flood, earthquake, confiscation, or outright attack/destruction.  The current situation in Honduras and Haiti, and in 2009, the seizure of the records of the Russian human rights group, Memorial,  show that these are very real possibilities.

Agnieszka:

Saludos desde Chicago!

Your work with the Red sounds fascinating. It is really impressive  that  you have created a unified data monitoring system for 68 Mexican NGOs.

That  is no mean feat.

Do you have a copy of the forms you use? Do you gather testimonies as well as case specific violation data?

When you describe the problems of sharing information, is that because of security issues and contact information? Or, is it just a lack of confidence? Do you present general reports based on the data from all the partner NGOs?

Can one NGO access information collected by another regarding a similar violation?

Also, we have a manual on using the Inter-American System of Human Rights as a tool for advocacy with a special focus on indigenous issues in Mexico. If you'd like  acop please email me at drothenb [at] depaul [dot] edu

It's in Spanish.

Agnieszka,

Thank you for sharing your very inspiring work with 68 organizations in Mexico to create a network for collecting and sharing information. Your comment, "It is a challenge to fulfill the expectations of a network of NGOs, believe me." really made me think of another collective of NGOs that successfully created shared documentation and a growing archive of information.

Memoria Abierta in Argentina has created a collective archive among 7 organizations (far fewer than the number you are working together with to coordinate information). Memoria Abiera shared their experience and on-going process in a tactical notebook called, "Open Memory: Using inter-institutional cooperation to facilitate access to human rights"

Here is the link to the Spanish: Memoria Abierta: Una experiencia de Coordinación Interinstitucional para facilitar el acceso a la información sobre Derechos Humanos 

They outlined a number of challenges that I'm sure you can relate to as well:

The need to Improve the actual state of the information/archives:

• organization;
• the physical space dedicated to archives;
• the availability of technological resources.

The need to deal with these varying conditions required several strategies

• increasing awareness of archival preservation methods (environmental conditions);
• providing or increasing the number of computers; and 
• designing new work spaces for archiving.

Tensions in the coordination processes itself - including:

• differing opinions within organizations with respect to collective decisions;
• changes to long-established documentary practices; 
• the diverse criteria related to archival access and documentation, and others.

I hope you will continue to share the process and outcomes of the efforts of the Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos in Mexico. We all have a great deal to learn from your experiences! I hope you are able to answer some of the many questions asked by Daniel. 

Hi Aga, thanks for describing your project in such detail!

Its an ambitious effort to unite so many NGOs around the same tool, and this really deserves a good case study, because there is a lot to learn from your experience.

I have the impression that one of the most important impacts of the project is the strengthening of the NGOs concerned, in their capacity to manage data, and in their understanding of how IT, and applying a methodology systematically, can help.

Using a "who did what to whom" system, like you have chosen to do, is always a strong learning experience for an NGO. Because its not that easy to read into a narrative and identify the rights affected, and the violations! Its only when you really get down to it any analyse cases, that you start to discover all sorts of questions that you never thought of before!!

Who did what to whom... it sounds easy, its not. Its easy to try out: take a case, and try to map out who did what to whom, using a table: victim, act, perpetrator(s), place and date. Then ask your colleagues to do the same. Do you get the same results??? I am sure that you will have some very interesting and hot debates!!!! Just try!

And if these questions are frequently debated within the documentation team, then you reach a consensus on how to record your cases consistently, meaning analyst A will come to the same conclusions as analyst B. Consistent data makes good data.

I learn something new from the specific stories that we analyze that are usually submitted by the participants, every time we do a training.

Good question: I think there are several aspects to think about here.

First, what types of data are going to be incorporated into the documentation system(s)?  For example, random sample survey data quality is judged on several factors.  There is the quality of the sample frame, or list of individual units that were randomly selected to be part of the group that provides data.  There is the quality of the interviews, the amount of nonresponse (to one question or the whole survey), and so on.  In terms of the data stored, both the data collected via the survey and the paradata -- that is, the data about how the data were collected -- should be kept.  That data includes the length of the interview, who the interviewer was, what day the interview occurred on, if others were present during the interview, if the interviewer noted anything significant about the interview, and so on.  I imagine a complete set of data related to a random sample survey of human rights abuses might contain the scanned forms, the data in a database, and the paradata.  

In the case of video/digital recordings of testimonies, I'd imagine important data to store would include where/when the testimony occurred, and other related information.  But I am certainly no expert on those types of data.

Of course, there are lots of other types of data.  An overall assessment of a project, I think, would include an assessment of the types of data collected (do they, together, provide good coverage of the human rights abuses?), the quality of each type of data, and the paradata associated with each type of data, as well as an assessment of the archiving/storage technique both for safety/confidentiality concerns and also permanency.

Perhaps the archivists could jump in here?