2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first elections, or the encouraging signs of progress in Burma.
The Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) is hard at work to ensure that technology and science best meet the needs of human rights defenders in these critical times. This past year, our HRP team helped the human rights movement achieve great things. Here’s a sample of our accomplishments:
- Martus, our secure, open-source information management software for human rights defenders continued to empower many human rights groups worldwide to secure thousands of stories of human rights violations and to use this information strategically to advance their causes. Our new and long-term Martus partners crossed a milestone and backed up to our public servers over 200,000 bulletins, each of which captures crucial, sensitive information about incidents from a victim’s story or from a field investigation.
- Our Martus team trained two new partners focused on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people: Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, or J-FLAG and AIDS-Free World. Both organizations work in the Caribbean, where sexual minorities face widespread violence, bigotry and marginalization. In the case of J-FLAG, Martus enables the organization to protect the identity of victims of abuse who come forward to tell their stories, to secure the information from their interviews, to report on the types of unsecured loans crimes documented, and to aggregate evidence for future court proceedings. Our support of groups advancing LGBTI rights is opening up new opportunities for helping many more such groups around the world.
- HRP members produced scientifically sound analysis that is advancing the process of legal justice in Guatemala. In a recent blog post, I described how HRP statistician Daniel Guzmán’s expert testimony in a breakthrough legal case against two former police officers helped score a remarkable victory in the fight to end impunity in Guatemala. I invite you to read Daniel’s first-person account of his expert testimony as published in the statistical magazine Chance. The testimony prompted further investigation that led to the arrest of three former senior officials. I’m proud to report here that, at the request of the Attorney General of Guatemala, bad credit loans our team has prepared statistical analysis to inform the prosecutions of these high-profile officials. We’re honored to support the process towards justice and accountability at this critical time in Guatemala’s history.
- Our team members are creating an “accountability toolkit” – a set of innovative techniques for identifying patterns of responsibility for grave human rights crimes. To that end, we combine statistical analysis of patterns of violence with information about military and police hierarchy, communication flow and deployment patterns. The combined analysis supports scientific arguments about responsibility for mass atrocities – arguments that are successful in court cases.
- Through projects that integrated statistical analyses into multidisciplinary human rights work, we engaged in the public debate about human rights violations in Colombia. First, in partnership with Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista, we assessed a methodology for studying conflict-related sexual violence in the country. We identified important opportunities for developing a substantive, quantitative-based sexual violence research agenda. This analysis is now helping to reframe how sexual violence is studied and understood by groups in Colombia and by the United Nations. Second, we strengthened the public debate about the free trade agreements that Colombia negotiates with the U.S. and the European Union. Colombia’s record of violence against trade union members has been an obstacle to finalizing the agreements. HRP’s calculated estimates of trade union member homicides – part of our work with the Colombian Commission of Jurists – brought clarity to this intense debate.
- We advanced human rights advocacy and the community more broadly by placing human rights at the forefront of academic research and by educating wide audiences about statistical best practices in the analysis of violence. HRP team members presented papers at academic conferences, published articles in academic journals, and offered many public talks. All HRP’s publications are available online.
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