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Thank you for your participation in our dialogue on Front Line Watchdogs: Monitoring accountability for human rights that took place from May 18 to 24, 2011.  You can read a summary of the topics discussed below and you can access the entire dialogue by clicking on the discussion threads at the bottom of this page.

Front line watchdogs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be seen in courtrooms ensuring fair trials, accompanying threatened human rights defenders, holding vigil outside police stations to prevent torture, protecting election ballot results, testing for discrimination, monitoring development aid projects, investigating toxic waste from companies, etc., etc.  While government bodies and corporations are often expected to monitor and regulate themselves, self-regulation does not always successfully uphold rights. Front line watchdogs take on this important citizen role of holding communities, government and corporations accountable.  Watchdog monitoring provides an opportunity to analyze, understand and influence abusive systems of power and to engage community members in human rights work.

In this dialogue participants considered the various ways in which organizations monitor, engaging the questions of the purpose of monitoring and its impact. They explored successful front line watchdog tactics, and discussed lessons learned, challenges and opportunities for practitioners to adapt these tactics for their own issues and communities. 

The featured resource practitioners for this dialogue included:

• Marna Anderson and others from WATCH, a court-monitoring organization based in Minnesota, United States
• Michael Ineichen, Lizzy Openshaw and Heather Collister from the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), Switzerland
• Stewart Vriesinga, Julie Myers and others from the Christian Peacemakers Team in Colombia
• Melanie Southworth - Advocacy Coordinator for the Christian Peacemakers Team Palestine
• Anna Innocenti - Project Manager for the Global Human Rights Defence (GHRD), The Netherlands
• Dr. Marsha Freeman of the International Women's Rights Action Watch (IWRAW), United States
• Bella Desai - former Nonviolent Peaceforce accompanier and current editor at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, United States
• Lorraine Smith and others from the International Barr Association (IBA) / International Criminal Court (ICC) Monitoring and Outreach Programme, The Netherlands
• Delphine Reculeau, Anne-Laurence Lacroix and Alexandra Kossin of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), Switzerland

Summary

Participants considered the following questions:

• Principles: What is monitoring, why do we do it, and what are we monitoring?
• Practice: How do we monitor? How do we engage communities in this work?
• Challenges: What are the challenges and opportunities that human rights monitors face today?
• Impact: How can data from monitoring be used to improve a situation?
• Resources: Share guides, tools, and other resources that you have found useful. 

Principles: What is monitoring, why do we do it, and what are we monitoring?

Participants identified a number of steps that define and outline the process of monitoring. First, monitoring relies upon the collection of information, either through the monitoring of a particular situation or event on the ground or beginning with specific actors (civil society organizations, national institutions, governments, regional or international systems) examining their response to those situations or events on the ground. The data should then be verified, to provide legitimacy and preemptively counter any attempts by other actors to discredit the information, and presented in a contextualized manner.

After gathering data, watchdog organizations may use the information to pressure governments, draft reports, or denounce human rights violations. Appeals, press announcements, and letter campaigns are some of the ways  in which this data may be used.  Also, using social media tools to raise the profile of at-risk persons can serve as a means of protecting them from abuse or assassination. Participants finally stressed the importance of gaining consent from those you seek to represent, particularly because sometimes public action can put victims in even greater danger. 

Practice: How do we monitor? How do we engage communities in this work?

Participants cited the differences between operating as an outside monitor or local monitor when engaging communities, something determined by a multitude of factors. For certain issues and groups, such as women's human rights, it is impossible for watchdogs to be separate because the core problems and remedies must be identified by those who are living them. Other times, such as with WATCH’s court-monitoring, an “outsider” perspective can be an asset, lending a different sort of credibility.

Ultimately, monitoring should hold international and regional human rights systems accountable, and provide credible information to human rights defenders and communities. Participatory research is a key way in which we monitor, because it provides credible, grassroots information, and creates a network of activists in the community to respond to defend human rights.

Challenges: What are the challenges and opportunities that human rights monitors face today?

Two key challenges discussed were the tension between advocacy and impartiality, and the question of a time frame for specific projects. For example, even data gathering can be a means of pressuring governments and advocating change.  However, advocacy can also result in a denial of access to monitoring organizations. Therefore the challenge is to balance the push for change with the practical interaction to maintain monitoring capacity.

Furthermore, it is very challenging to define a timeframe for a monitoring project.  Watchdogs must decide whether to choose a subjective length of time for the campaign or commit to it until it has been completed. While the latter is preferable, organizations must then also struggle with how to prevent the campaign from being perceived as static. Finally, while long-term projects can provide a better overview and more precise recommendations, they also run the risk that people in positions of power will sometimes claim that the data is out of date.

Resources

New Tactics Resources

• Dialogues:
  • Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Participatory Research for Action—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
• Notebooks: 
  • Familiar Tools, Emerging Issues: Adapting traditional human rights monitoring to emerging issues—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Research for Action: A region-wide participatory process to build participation, awareness & advocacy on trade policies—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Side by Side: Protecting and encouraging threatened activists with unarmed international accompaniment—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Using Government Budgets as a Monitoring Tool—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
• Tactics:
  • Citizen monitoring of courts as a means of creating system change—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Monitoring checkpoints to document abuses and demonstrate solidarity—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Transmitting vote tallies by mobile phone to prevent tampering—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics
  • Training local level monitors to document and seek redress for human rights violations—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects these tactics

Online Resources/Documents

• 'Claiming Rights, claiming justice', guidebook developed by the International Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A Procedural Guide
• Equality and Women's Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• Human Rights Impact Resource Centre
• New Guidelines--Opportunities for Women's Human Rights NGOs
• The Advocates’ A Practitioner's Guide to Human Rights Monitoring, Documentation and Advocacy
  • USHRN and the Testify!Project: Using Video to Bring the Stories of Human Rights Abuses to the United Nations—New Tactics’ Kristin Antin connects this project
• Resource Library on the HURIDOCS Website
• Tactical Tech's Visualizing information
• Tactical Tech's Security
• Tactical Tech’s Information Activism website
• UN Human Rights Education and Training
• WATCH: Training
  HURIDOCS’ What is Monitoring?
• Working for Change, No. 1: A Practical Guide to Acting Against the Economic, Social and Cultural Root Causes of Torture and Other Forms of Violence through Action Files—OMCT’s Andrea Meraz explains this workbook
• Working for Change, No. 2: A Practical Guide to Preparing Alternative Reports to United Nations Treaty Bodies addressing the Economic, Social and Cultural Root Causes of Torture and Other Forms of Violence—OMCT’s Andrea Meraz explains this workbook
• Written testimonies (ISHR)
• 18 Basic Principles of Human Rights Monitoring

Film

• Al-Bweireh, Hebron District (CPT)
• "10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action"

Photo from Informative bulletin Quarterly of Peace of Peace Brigades International, Columbia, Feb. 2007.