Articles, Guides & Video about the Practice of Human Rights Documentation

HURIDOCS events standard formats : a tool for documenting human rights violations – The Events Standard Formats are a methodology for using the “violations” approach in monitoring and documenting all types of human rights: civil and political as well as economic, social and cultural. They are integrated, flexible and adaptable, and cover the various aspects of documenting human rights events.

Solving for X: How Number Matter in the Fight for Human Rights – a feature-length documentary about the quantitative approach to human rights data. The film documents the work of Dr. Patrick Ball, leader of the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 2012 / 71min / color / SD and HD video / USA / Dir: Theo Lipfert

Working Safely and Effectively with Documentation Tools – a New Tactics community discussion, June 2014

Human Rights: Databases, Data Sharing and Data Security, a video of this presentation at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley (2009)

Documentation Tools

• CaseBox is designed to support the needs of litigation NGOs which are looking for an integrated and web-based application to manage their caseload. (but this tool is flexible enough to be used for any kind of case-management) Built by HURIDOCS
• Corroborator is intended to help journalists, researchers and civil society activists cope with modern large scale data. It is designed to help analysts create verifiable chronologies of events (Incidents) based on information submitted from a multitude of sources (Bulletins). Built by eQualit.ie
• Martus is a secure information management tool developed by Benetech that allows you to create a searchable and encrypted database and back this data up remotely to your choice of publicly available servers. The Martus software is used by organizations around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses.
• OpenEvSys is a free and open source database application developed by HURIDOCS and is built on theEvents methodology for recording violations and the “who did what to whom” data model
• RightsCase – RightsCase helps you to securely record, collate and analyse information and evidence of past and ongoing human rights violations. RightsCase allows you to access meaningful statistics through visualisations of collated data. Built by eQualit.ie
• Ushahidi is a data management system that rapidly collects data from the crowd and visualizes what happened, when and where.

And here is my human-rights-doc twitter list of organizations, people, resources and tools that support the practice of human rights documentation.