Human Rights Documentation Toolkit Launched

The website Human Rights Documentation (HRD) Toolkit, in the development of which the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) has participated, was launched on October 25, 2016, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The Human Rights Documentation Toolkit is a multidisciplinary, interactive online portal providing human rights documenters with existing documentation resources and tools, broadly accepted practices, and ongoing support from other documentation stakeholders.

The HLC’s Legal Programme Director, Milica Kostić, spoke at the launch about the HLC’s work in documenting human losses during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the ways in which the HLC uses its documentation for different activities and projects, as well as about the HLC’s contribution to the developement of the Toolkit.

The HLC worked on the development of the Human Rights Documentation Toolkit together with a  consortium of ten organizations which have extensive experience working across multiple sectors in human rights documentation.

As part of this project, the HLC organized a consultative meeting in February 2016 with representatives of organizations from the region working on documenting human rights violations committed during and in connection with the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990’s. Representatives of the Center for Democracy and Transitional Justice (BiH), Association of Women from Prijedor “Izvor” (BiH), Center for Dealing with the Past – Documenta (Croatia), Vojvodinian Civic Center (Serbia), Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Croatia, Association of Witnesses and Survivors of Genocide (BiH), Association of Concentration Camp Survivors in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Engine Room (Croatia), Sandžak Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms (Serbia), HLC and HLC Kosovo participated in this meeting. Information gathered at the consultative meeting, together with that collected within the survey conducted among organizations from the region, are part of the survey results on the Toolkit – a visual mapping of documentation around the world.

HLC representatives participated in expert roundtables and peer reviews, on the basis of which some Broadly Accepted Practices briefing papers were drafted. The papers can be found in the Toolkit’s Resource Library.