Canada-US Human Rights Information and Documentation Network
The Third Annual Meeting of the
Canada-U.S. Human Rights Information and Documentation Network
(CUSHRID Net)
November 3-5, 1996
University of Maryland, College Park
Plenary Session
The conference opened with a
welcome from Ernest Wilson, Director of the Center for
International Development and Conflict Management at the
University of Maryland. Audrey Chapman of the AAAS Science and
Human Rights Program, which has hosted the Secretariat of CUSHRID
Net for the past three years, introduced keynote speakers Roger
Clark, Secretary General of Amnesty International-Canadian
Section (English Speaking), and Ken Roth, Executive Director of
Human Rights Watch.
In his welcome, Dr. Wilson
stressed the need to transform information technology into wisdom
which manages and even prevents conflict. How can our knowledge
and skills address a tragedy like Zaire? How can they prevent a
future tragedy?
Roger Clark built on that theme,
noting the need to make information technology serve as a
catalyst for action. He described Amnesty's structure and its
creation of action centers which both collect information on
human rights violations with extraordinary rapidity and
disseminate it to Amnesty's members throughout the world. The
members themselves form action centers which use the range of
information technology to call, write, fax, or e-mail their
concerns about violations almost as they occur, and their support
for prisoners of conscience and human rights activists whose
activities place their freedom and their lives in jeopardy.
Ken Roth noted the role of
information technology in establishing a human rights community
and movement. As Amnesty International uses its members to
disseminate information, Human Rights Watch uses the press as a
surrogate constituency. Their ress releases raise questions like
what is the role of multinational petroleum companies in the
killing of environmental activists, which challenge the public to
move beyond blaming direct actors who commit human rights abuses
to laying responsibility for the climate in which abuses occur.
They translate human rights material into short, accessible
documents for constituencies who will act – labor
organizations, women's organizations, religious organizations and
environmental organizations, establishing the link between human
rights and other interests.
Panels
Panel I: Using
Information Technologies to Build Human Rights Communities
Panelists Xiao Qiang of Human
Rights in China, Victories Vrana of the Network of East-West
Women, Doug Steele of Burmanet, and Isabelle Patenaude of the
International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) represented
the global range of human rights groups and interests.
As they described the activities
of their organizations, they challenged conference attendees to
think about the human and monetary costs and consequences of
communicating human rights information. Doug Steele noted that it
is a 15-year offense to possess an unauthorized modem in Burma.
Victoria Vrana explained that e-mail, which so many of us take
for granted, costs $100 a month in some Eastern European
countries. Even conventional mail can be exorbitant. To mail a
proposal in some locations can cost up to one month's salary and
take a year to arrive at its destination. Isabelle Patenaude
described the difficulty of organizations in some Southern
countries in simply getting a phone line installed, which in some
cases requires bribery, and the cost of communication once it has
been - $10 for one organization in South Africa to send a
one-page fax.
Panel II: Building
Links with Human Rights Communities and Networks in Other Parts
of the World
Panelists included (accents
removed) Marina Patricia Jimenez Ramirez of the Red Nacional de
Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos - Mexico/ Centro de
Derechos Humanos Fray Bartholome de las Casas, Jagdish Parikh of
Aisalink/Interdoc-AsPac, Svend Bitsch Christiansen of the
European Coordination Committee on Human Rights
Documentation/ARCADE, and Debra Gunman of HURINet/North-South
Centre Project.
Each described how their Regional
networks functioned, including the level of technology utilized,
problems encountered and needs unmet. Marina Jimenez illustrated
the effectiveness of the Red in galvanizing responses from the
Mexican human rights community to the government in protesting
human rights abuses, but stressed the need for international
responses. She noted that communication via the Net was not
always possible, and that Red, the Network, functioned on more
than an electronic level. Jagdish Parikh cautioned that not
everyone with e-mail has access to the Web. Many Asian
organizations must convert documents to ASCII and reformat in
chunks of 30K to make information accessible. He also reminded
conferees of the cost of electronic communication. Receipt of
junk e-mail created a huge financial drain, for example, in
Nepal, where the cost to receive e-mail runs $1/byte. Debra
Guzman explained the challenges of developing a
Mediterranean-based Web site to enhance interregional links among
multi-lingual and multi-faceted organizations from Lebanon to
Albania, Portugal to Tunisia.
Panel III: Potential
Impact of On-Line Censorship and Restrictions on the Protection
and Evolution of Human Rights
Panelists Karen Sorenson of Human
Rights Watch, Lisa Kamm of the American Civil Liberties Union,
Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, and Daniel Weitzner of the Center for Democracy and
Technology discussed a range of issues. Karen Sorenson and Daniel
Weitzner described national legislation which prohibits
encryption where keys are not accessible to federal law
enforcement, and options for responding to threats to freedom of
information transfer. Lisa Kamm described a law passed by Georgia
making the use of pseudonyms on the Net illegal and the broad
reach of legislation which makes U.S. exporting of cryptography
illegal. Patrick Ball identified many of the threats to security
of information communicated over the Internet, and the possible
solutions to making information secure, including signature
verification and use of encryption software.
Working Groups
Working Group on Organizing
Human Rights Communities On-Line
The Working Group came together to
discuss, in broad terms, what it means to organize human rights
workers on-line -- motivations behind the collaborations, various
types of activism, and the best, and appropriate, electronic
means by which to achieve certain goals. Through the discussion,
participants identified a need for established guidelines or
standards for electronic reporting of human rights information.
Patricia Sutherland was asked to coordinate an ad-hoc working
group to look at ways to evaluate information on-line.
The need to develop shared tools
and resources to facilitate organizing on-line was also
highlighted. The group suggested that the CUSHRID Net home page
contain tutorials on technical aspects, as well as appropriate
use, of a variety of technologies.
The group also considered and made
recommendations on the draft proposal "CUSHRID Net
Guidelines on Activism" which was later passed at the
CUSHRID AGM.
Full Text Databases and
Electronic Publishing
In a lively and wide-ranging
discussion, the group noted thatfull text databases, indexed or
structured databases, relational databases, and other archival
and retrieval systems all are useful with human rights data;
there is no one best technology for all purposes.
Full text databases and retrieval
systems preserve detail and make it possible to search for
patterns we did not suspect when we first entered the data. They
also make faster data entry possible, as we can scan in forms
rather than keying in abstracts; this is useful in field trips
under time pressure.
-- Full text retrieval is much
more efficient and effective when the documents employ a
controlled vocabulary, and preferably an entire standardized
thesaurus of terms and their usages.
-- Electronic publishing offers
advantages over paper but also requires standardization, both of
form and of technology, to be truly useful. Efforts toward this
standardization are still at a very early stage.
CUSHRID ’97 Annual
General Meeting
The Annual General Meeting for
CUSHRID Net 1996 was held Sunday morning November 3, 1996 and was
chaired by Audrey Chapman of AAAS. At the opening of the meeting,
membership in CUSHRID stood at 26 institutional members and 17
individual members. During her opening comments, Audrey Chapman
stated that although there is a fair amount of activity leading
up to and immediately following CUSHRID Net conferences, she
hopes for more coordination and communication between members
between the meetings. She urged that members take advantage of
the Network’s listserv as a means to sharing information and
make recommendations to the Secretariat and Steering Committee
members about Network activities. Also, in light of sustained
activity between conferences, Chapman expressed the hope the
Working Groups would maintain the momentum of their work between
conferences
Patricia Sutherland presented a policy on
activism that was
commissioned at the 1995 meeting. Sutherland stated that the
Network’s role in advocacy would be facilitate common
actions by providing such fora as the CUSHRID member’s
listserv and the CUSHRID World Wide Web homepage where members
could present alerts, sign-on letters and other initiatives in
which members could participate. After minimal discussion, the
new policy on activism was adopted by the network.
The Chair stated that the
network’s only requirement for membership is a commitment to
international human rights standards as defined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and that they are in agreement with
the mission of the network. She then posed the question to the
floor as to 1.) does the network need any membership
requirements, and 2.) if so, should they be stricter, e.g.
denouncing violence as a means to protecting the rights of some?
The chair added that it would be difficult to deny or remove a
membership without much stricter membership requirements. One
member stated the need for a membership policy as some
organizations work to promote one certain right but not all.
Another member said that it was important that the people and
organizations with whom she works not advocate violence. In the
end, 6 members voted to redefine membership criteria and 5
members voted to maintain the current requirements as maintained
by the Charter.
Steering Committee Elections
Elections for the rotating chairs
on the Steering Committee were held. Before the vote, the role of
the sponsoring organizations were discussed. The four original
sponsoring institutions, AAAS, HURIDOCS, AI-USA and AI-Canada
hold permanent chairs on the steering committee and three elected
members to be selected at the annual meeting to serve a one year
term, eligible for reelection. A motion was also passed to
include one individual member on the steering committee. The vote
was taken and Human Rights Watch (HRW), Human Rights
Documentation Exchange (HRDE) and the elected members were
International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development
(ICHRRD). Patricia Sutherland was elected as the individual
member on the Steering Committee.
CUSHRID Net Adopts New Guidelines on
Activism
At the 1995 AGM held at the
University of Maryland, Working Group 7 "Translating Human
Rights Documentation into Action" recommended that the
network "Establish a process by which member organizations
could take direct action (e.g. circulating joint letters or
appeals) on urgent issues relating to information
technologies." This recommendation was modified in the
plenary session because institutional policies of member
organizations might make it difficult to engage in collective
activism. The Steering Committee was then asked to examine
CUSHRID Net's policy on activism and make recommendations to the
membership at the 1996 AGM.
CONSIDERATIONS
In all discussion of this issue,
it must be kept in mind that:
- CUSHRID Net is made up of
organizations and individuals with diverse goals and
purposes;
- techniques for activism and
guidelines for activism are not the same across the
membership;
- there are differing legal
restrictions between countries governing activist
behaviour;
- activism in these guidelines
refers to the context of information handling issues.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Subscribers to the CUSHRID Net
listserv (members of CUSHRID Net) be able to post information on
action issues related to human rights information handling;
2. CUSHRID Net as an organization
not adopt an advocacy role;
3. The Steering Committee
facilitate collective action toward protecting and promoting
human rights information and documentation practices.
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