Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
UN, its sub-bodies and other inter-governmental
organizations. They are also set by specialized
agencies such as the International Labor Orga-
nization (ILO) that are linked to the UN, and by
regional bodies such as the Council of Europe and
the African Union. Human rights monitoring is
undertaken to see if these standards are being met
in domestic settings, and it involves the repeated
collection and recording of information for later
use (Guzman & Verstappen, 2003). It is done by
the human rights treaty-based committees of the
UN (including the Human Right Committee, the
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination, and so on), special rapporteurs and
other bodies under the UN Commission on Human
Rights, and some other specialist agencies. It is
also undertaken by government bodies, including
human rights commissions, and by NGOs.
Human rights treaty bodies like the UN Hu-
man Rights Committee consider periodic reports
submitted by UN member states on their compli-
ance with human rights treaties. International
NGOs play an important role in this process by
providing reliable and independent information
to the Committees through reports that shadow
the entire state report or provide commentary on
specific articles of a convention. These shadow
reports, which are an opportunity for NGOs to
voice their human rights concerns and criticisms
at an international level, rely on unhindered
grassroots NGO activity in a country and the
flow of information from them. In the absence
of these information flows, the attention of the
international community will not be drawn to the
situation in a country, even if the level of human
rights violations there merits attention.
In writing about how to document and respond
to allegations of torture within the international
system for the protection of human rights, Giffard
(2000) said that some NGOs have adopted excel-
lent methods of reporting, but many less experi-
enced NGOs are either unaware of the importance
of the information they provide, or have never had
the opportunity to learn how best to present it. A
significant proportion of the information received
from such NGOs is wasted, she said, not because
the allegations are unfounded, but because impor-
tant facts are omitted, the allegation is worded in
excessively political speech, or it is presented in a
language that the recipient does not understand or
does not have the resources to have translated. In
other cases a lack of familiarity with the functions
of the various international bodies and mechanisms
means that information is incorrectly sent to an
authority that is not empowered or mandated to
use it effectively.
NGOs generally work with others to gather
details of situation or individual cases; to inves-
tigate events linked to suspected human rights
violations; to produce records and analysis of
investigations carried out; and to report to an
international body. ICTs simplify all of these
steps in the human rights information chain, but
without the application of appropriate norms and
standards the mistakes highlighted by Giffard
(2000) are likely to be repeated.
Human rights NGOs monitor ongoing viola-
tions of human rights as well as the compliance of
governments with treaty obligations. They collect
data relating to violations from various sources
including newspaper articles, official reports and
documents, medical records, and testimonies from
witnesses and people directly involved. Policy-
makers, prosecutors, truth commissions, academ-
ics and other actors use the information collected,
as do the international NGOs that submit shadow
reports to the treaty monitoring bodies.
If an organization is recording or investigat-
ing large numbers of human rights cases it must
have a systematic way to file information. This
requires the design and use of a good information
management system (Ball, 1996) which gives the
organization a way to organise its information
and to accumulate information from a diversity
of sources over time. This has implications that
go far beyond computing, according to Ball. For
example, if an organization conceptualizes a hu-
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