Human Rights Documentation

Winter 2012 | Volume 31, Number 2 | Download PDF

Human Rights Documentation

In This Issue

This FOCUS revolves around the theme of human rights documentation and the issues surrounding the survival and integrity of evidence of human rights violations.


Human Rights and Electronic Media: a CRL Study

This article discusses some of practices and technologies used by human rights monitoring groups to collect electronic documentation, as part of CRL’s electronic evidence assessment funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.


The Archivo Historico de la Policia Nacional de Guatemala at the University of Texas

The Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional de Guatemala consists of approximately 80 million documents, about 12 million of which have been digitized and will soon be available from the University of Texas at Austin website. These documents, dating from 1882 to 1996, chronicle the activities of Guatemala’s National Police, the enforcers of the country’s oppressive military dictatorship during 36 years of internal armed conflict.


Nunca Mais: Human Rights Evidence Rediscovered

Through a partnership between CRL, LAMP, and the Ministério Público Federal in Brazil, nearly one million pages of the collection Brasil: Nunca Mais, containing Brazil’s Military Supreme Court documents (processos), have been digitized. These proceedings document the cases of more than 7,000 persons arrested, convicted, and/or executed by the Court between 1964 and 1979.


The University of Texas at Austin is digitizing the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, which contains millions of documents, dating from 1882 to 1996, that chronicle the activities of Guatemala’s National Police. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Guatemala.