Human rights documentation: A Foundational Building Block of Human Rights Change

Danna Ingleton

Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica

Problem Statement: Human rights defenders are operating in increasingly vulnerable and challenging environments, where their own safety is becoming threatened as a result of increased criminalization of human rights work and the increasing use of nefarious technologies, such as spyware, by repressive regimes. The safety and protection, as well as connection and verification of information collected by human rights defenders, investigators and journalists is of the utmost importance for the health of civil society. Frontline human rights actors may face dangers such as their devices being confiscated, searched, wiped or destroyed, slowing the pursuit of human rights-related justice. For some, they may have limited or no internet connectivity, potentially resulting in the collection of incomplete evidence or even data loss. Without sufficient connectivity or verification, their information may contain limited or insufficient metadata, which can result in their evidence less impactful or inadmissible in court. Our work addresses the security, efficiency and ultimately, the resiliency of human rights defenders so as to enable them to work in the safest and most effective conditions. We make sure that those who seek accountability and justice can accurately document and protect information without fearing for their physical or digital safety, making them more successful in the pursuit of justice against human rights violations.

Proposed Activities: Our proposed activities are related to an existing partnership with Horizontal - a small tech firm who created the app Tella. We have been working with them to integrate Tella and our flagship database tool Uwazi. This integration allows Uwazi users to populate their secure databases through their smart phones allowing for quick, safe and effective documentation of human rights violations. Horizontal is presently upgrading their Tella app in two ways, for which our proposed activity is to formally roll-out the new integrations with our existing and new civil society partners. This would include doing community outreach and capacity building, such as developing visual aids. One of the new features of the Tella app that is particularly important is the inclusion of Uwazi’s “relationships” tagging from within the mobile app. This advance is a crucial step forward in supporting the security, efficiency and resilience of human rights actors in using the app to input and organize data into Uwazi. This development pushes our teams, as well as individual users of Uwazi and Tella to collaborate within our existing systems, enhancing interoperability, but also improving the effectiveness and security for human rights actors. Secondly, Horizontal is updating the iOS version of Tella so that it integrates with Uwazi. This is an important technical development in the adaptation and customisation of existing infrastructure services to serve the wider community's needs. With Tella currently connecting to Uwazi on Android devices only, the development of an iOS version will help to improve inclusivity of the app, advancing opportunities for access and participation in human rights documentation, in turn aiding research, scholarship and action. We would propose that a portion of this grant is to be used to maintain salaries of technical roles, who are crucial in the continued functioning of our tool, Uwazi. Their role is to ensure Uwazi remains stable and that any bugs or issues that arise as part of the integration with Tella, or due to the influx of users, are managed quickly and effectively. Stable functioning of our tools is crucial for our users, supporters, and collaborators, as well as for those relying on access to our resources.We are envisioning a timeline of approximately 8 months, from 1 November, 2023 until 30 June, 2024. This would allow an even financial split each month and provide enough to support the various team members we would have to support as part of the project. This would cover communications officers, tech officers and developers to manage the functioning and implementation of the integration, and finally any other necessary team members, such as for admin purposes. We envision that by the end of the 8 months, all communications materials will have been finalised and shared and the updated iOS app will be running.

Openness: For 40 years, HURIDOCS has been an NGO at the forefront of developing interrelated methodologies and tools in support of human rights documentation efforts in an open context. We have done this by bringing together the human rights community enabling us to listen, learn, and co-create with them. This integration project with Horizontal’s Tella will allow us to further support communities faced with human rights struggles and those aiming to address such violations, such as frontline human rights defenders. This integration project will allow a continued sharing and accessibility of key human rights-related information, allowing communities better and safer storage and documentation of evidence for human rights violations. This project strives towards equity and inclusivity in its use, and provides powerful means to strengthen the resilience and sustainability of human rights documentation in areas of the world where connectivity and openness may be threatened due to authoritarian and oppressive regimes. This integration project helps protect these marginalised groups in providing a platform to protect themselves from physical and digital repression while collecting and storing sensitive information, and to protect the data they collect from censorship, tampering, interception, and destruction. This information can then be used by the wider community to further encourage openness of human rights documentation.

Challenges: There are a few key challenges to carrying out this work. First is in regards to the training of users and the challenges of information dissemination versus behavioral change. We hope to employ communication methods that encourage actual behavioral change therefore encouraging long term positive effects and allowing more efficient work within teams. However, this takes time, effort and resources, which can be difficult. The second challenge we anticipate is when tracing metrics on the integration use and gaining intel on the impacts our integration has on the human rights work that our partners do. Given the nature of our organization and this project, this will require two layers of MEL information, first from our partners and their assessment of the integration and secondly from our own side. Already MEL assessments can create challenges as they are often left neglected so to require them at two levels will require an even higher level of attention and management, so it may be difficult to know the true impact. Lastly, is the challenge of possible bugs and glitches on the user-end when the updated integration is launched. This is an inevitable side to tech innovation, and so requires effective expertise and resources to manage accordingly.

Neglectedness: As of yet, we have been unable to apply for any funding for this area of our work. Funding for open source tech solutions can be difficult to come by due to tensions with the big tech community, let alone for partnerships trying to build bridges between open source organisations and practitioners. This kind of partnership with Horizontal is essential for a strong civil society and we hope that it can be more deeply fostered by the funding sector. Open source solutions face a particularly difficult financial challenge due to this “openness” and the freedom of software; it is difficult to identify how and who should be funding the work that will be used for free. For this reason any source of funding for our work tends to occur through large donations, but these too are slim to come by and pose their own associated challenges. Documentation work in general is often neglected in regards to funding due to how “basic” it seems, next to some of the more “exciting” areas to human rights work. However, in reality it is one of the most crucial elements to human rights defense. This, alongside the issues open source technology has made our integration particularly hard to find funding sources for. Our work is critical to the health of open infrastructures in the field of human rights protection but for these reasons, other potential funding sources have so far proved limited.

Success: In a short term context, we would like to see firstly, that all our partners have been informed formally about the new integrations and what this opportunity may hold for their work. In doing this we can ensure the biggest impact and provide the best opportunities for expanding our community and encouraging active participation. In the longer term, we hope to obtain positive evidence of the use of the integration by our partners, as well as MEL assessments on their human rights-related actions and the level of improved safety for front line defenders. This will require joint efforts from both ourselves and our partners and could use a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessment criteria, from surveys to collation of data regarding usage in numeric terms. We would also measure our success through the backend stability of Uwazi-usage that acts to support these integrations and accordingly an increase in user metrics. This would be measured quantitatively through our own data collection systems. More generally we will see the project as a success following a strengthened partnership with Horizontal. We would hope to see doors open for future integration partnerships as a result of this positive foundation.

Total Budget: 25,000 USD

Affiliations: HURIDOCS (Uwazi) & Horizontal (Tella)

LMIE Carveout: Yes. Our list of working locations of our team and organisation includes countries such as Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica, Egypt, Ecuador, France, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Italy, Kenya, Nicaragua, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uruguay and the USA. Of our locations, over half of them qualify as lower and middle income countries by the World Bank. In addition, the locations of our project’s community and our organisation's official partners are also worldwide, and despite the fact that our organisation is registered in Geneva, Switzerland, the majority of our locations of our projects users, contributors and maintainers fall within LMIEs.

Team Skills: As a documentalist organisation at our core, we are firmly positioned in this field, holding strong relationships with civil society groups and extremely well-versed in advances for technical platforms in the context of human rights and justice. Having been founded 40 years ago and now operating in over 20 different countries, we have grown with new technology and have been able to navigate the expanding world of open source tools with confidence and success. A secure footing in the civil society world and within the tech space has provided meaningful learnings and skills, giving us the capacity to see even bigger projects flourish, hopefully with more integrations like this one. Other than these more specific skills we hold, more generally does our team operate on the basis of honesty, integrity and community learning, giving us the opportunity to learn important new lessons regarding this space and our integration project.

Submission Number: 152