Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
beyonD citizen journaliSm:
uSing Human rigHtS event
reporting toolS
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searchable: specific violations and identi-
fying details can be searched by groups or
outside researchers granted access to the
records; and
transparent: the software is open source
According to Benetech, a Californian non-profit
company that develops technology-based tools
to assist human rights organizations, there are
about 10,000 human rights NGOs throughout
the world that collect information in the field.
Much of the violation and abuse information
gathered by grassroots organizations is cur-
rently being lost to confiscation, destruction,
or neglect, they claim, and as a result the ef-
fectiveness of these NGOs is reduced and it is
difficult or impossible for prosecutors, truth
commissions and international human rights
groups to use the information as evidence to
hold the perpetrators of human rights abuses
accountable (Benetech, 2008).
In response to this problem, Benetech devel-
oped the Martus Human Rights Bulletin System,
which is a tool designed to collect, organize and
securely store human rights violations information.
It enables grassroots NGOs to create a searchable
and encrypted database on an off-site server and
to store their records on this. The software, which
is freely available and open source, is used by
organizations around the world to protect sensitive
information and to shield the identity of victims
or witnesses who provide testimony on human
rights abuses.
The Martus Human Rights Bulletin System
addresses what Benetech say are the four critical
requirements for software to protect the records
of grassroots human rights groups. These are that
it should be
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so any group can examine the code and
make an informed decision about using it
(Benetech, 2008)
Some of the organizations that use Martus to
protect their data also use Analyzer, which is a
software program developed by the Human Rights
DataAnalysis Group (HRDAG) to organize human
rights information for statistical analysis. Data is
coded according to the “who did what to whom”
model, and records describing the source of the
information, the victim(s), the perpetrator(s) and
the acts committed are entered, with relationships
created between the different pieces of informa-
tion. Analyzer can combine data from multiple
data collection projects, and in so doing it can
provide the sort of large-scale statistical analysis
required by truth commissions. The HRDAG has
assisted the truth and reconciliation commissions
in South Africa, Sierra Leone and East Timor and
in all of these its work proved to be instrumental
in helping the commissions to make powerful and
credible findings.
HURIDOCS have developed an alternative
data collection system called WinEvSys for hu-
man rights NGOs. This is based on the standard
formats and micro-thesauri developed by the
same organization, and is implemented using
the Microsoft Access database software. Unlike
the two-stage data collection/analysis approach
of Martus and Analyzer, the WinEvSys system
can produce analysis and statistics based on type
of violation, perpetrator, victim characteristics,
geographic area, time period, and so on.
While the WinEvsys database system uses
built-in vocabularies to describe all types of viola-
tions and all aspects of a human rights case, thus
giving a human rights organization flexibility in
its data recording, its use requires more training
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usable: as easy to use as email, can run on
an inexpensive computer and does not re-
quire a constant connection to the Internet;
secure: records are encrypted, stored se-
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curely at a remote site, backed up to mul-
tiple locations and protected by a unique
password;
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