Human Rights

The Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research supports the community of teachers, students, researchers, and law and social justice advocates working in the multidisciplinary sphere of human rights. The Center pursues three programmatic directions:  building research collections, supporting and engaging in human rights education efforts, and developing events and collaborations related to human rights documentation and research. The Center was established in 2005 and is based in the Columbia University Libraries and Information Services. They are the official repository for the archives of major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International USA, the Physicians for Human Rights,  Human Rights First, and Human Rights Watch.

CRL’s human rights collections feature primary source materials ranging from the proceedings of the post-World War II war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo to the files of the Khmer Rouge Santebal police recovered from the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia. Document types include treaties, speeches, government and NGO publications, reports, addresses from congresses and conventions, newspapers, transcripts, case files, personal diaries of victims of human rights violations, and the papers of human rights activists. Secondary sources include periodicals, dissertations, and published works of fiction and nonfiction covering the breadth of topics in this multidisciplinary field.

The UT Libraries' Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) is committed to the long-term preservation of fragile and vulnerable records of human rights struggles worldwide, the promotion and secure usage of human rights archival materials, and the advancement of human rights research and advocacy around the world.

The Human Rights Web Archive @ Columbia University is a searchable collection of archived copies of human rights websites created by non-governmental organizations, national human rights institutions, tribunals and individuals. Collecting began in 2008 and has been ongoing for active websites. New websites are added to the collection regularly.

The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library houses one of the largest collections of more than sixty thousand core human rights documents, including several hundred human rights treaties and other primary international human rights instruments. The site also provides access to more than four thousands links and a unique search device for multiple human rights sites. This comprehensive research tool is accessed by more than a 250,000 students, scholars, educators, and human rights advocates monthly from over 150 countries around the world. Documents are available in nine languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

WITNESS makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to protect and defend human rights by identify critical situations and teach those affected by them the basics of video production, safe and ethical filming techniques, and advocacy strategies.