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Speaker:
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David Magier
[bio]
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Title:
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Welcome on behalf of Columbia University Libraries/CHRDR
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Formats:
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Video
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Abstract:
The ability of governments, courts, and the human rights community to deter
and punish genocide, state-sponsored violence, and other violations of
human rights depends upon access to evidence in the form of documentation
of such crimes and the records of investigations and legal proceedings
against perpetrators. Truth commissions also depend upon documentation in
many forms to carry out their mission of revealing the human cost of
atrocity. Likewise in academia, researchers and teachers in many
disciplines have a strong interest in these primary resources, as well as
the documentation that illuminates the evolution and operation of the major
organizations that have embodied the international human rights movement.
Today human rights evidence and documentation is often at risk, by virtue
of technological obsolescence and a host of legal and economic factors.
The Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia
University Libraries, with the co-sponsorship of the Center for Research
Libraries Global Resources Network, the Center for the Study of Human
Rights, and the University of Texas Libraries, is proud to present this public conference on "Human Rights Archives and Documentation:
Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Justice".
The CHRDR at Columbia University Libraries is the official repository
for the archives of Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch,
Committee of Concerned Scientists, and other major international human
rights organizations. (Discussions are under way with Human Rights First, Physicians for Human Rights, and the International Center for Transitional Justice). Besides preserving and making accessible the archives themselves, the Center undertakes programs like this conference, to highlight such resources for academic research and teaching purposes, but also for the benefit of human
rights workers and advocates, legal practitioners, journalists, and others around the world.
This conference, which marks the formal opening of the archives for public access, brings together many important "stakeholders" in human rights documentation from several different spheres: those for whom creation and/or use of documentation, in all forms, is a basic feature of their daily work. These different communities often do not communicate directly, and the goal of our meetings tonight and over the next two days is to enable them to identify the issues
around documentation (e.g. how it is created, archived, preserved,
accessed, utilized -- in public HR campaigns, legal proceedings, truth
commissions, as well as academic settings), and to establish an appropriate
role for archives in addressing those issues for the benefit of all the
stakeholders.
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