Calling the World as Witness

Human-rights group creates online hub to document abuses

Witness, a human-rights organization in New York, has long worked with grass-roots groups

around the world to use video to put a human face on serious human-rights issues and fight for change.

It has helped groups create short films that shine light on abuses such as the violent displacement of indigenous groups in Burma, slavery in Brazil, and torture in Uganda, and screen them for international human-rights organizations, politicians, and concerned citizens.

Now, seeking to better harness the Internet’s potential for reaching a mass audience, Witness has built a video-sharing site called the Hub.

Founded 15 years ago by the musician Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, the organization got its start by handing out video cameras. But it soon realized that wasn’t enough, and it then started to provide training and assistance in thinking through how to use videos to achieve activists’ goals.

With its latest project, Witness hopes to help human-rights groups mobilize people worldwide. But as the organization developed the Hub, it had to grapple with the potential dangers to the activists who post videos on sensitive topics and the people who appear in that material.

Reaching Out to More People

The Hub is designed to be a central clearinghouse for a broad array of human-rights concerns.

Activists can upload human-rights-related video, audio, or photographic material to the Hub site and provide information about issues and links to other resources. They can create campaign pages and discussion groups to advance their activism, and by the end of the year, the site will feature tools for creating online petitions for viewers to sign.

Visitors will be able to search for material by country, region, and specific human-rights issues, such as immigration or the death penalty.

“This is really a chance for us to reach a much broader audience and to give even more people a chance to tell their stories and share their experiences,” says Jenni Wolfson, Witness’s acting executive director.

The goal of video advocacy, Ms. Wolfson explains, isn’t necessarily to document human-rights violations as they happen.

“Obviously abuses being captured in the moment are incredibly powerful and can go a long way in changing a situation, but those moments are rare,” says Ms. Wolfson. “A lot of the video that we work on with our partners are personal testimonies of people who have survived abuses. It’s those personal stories that really help people to connect to the issues.”

A Mother’s Tale

For example, Dual Injustice, an advocacy video created by a Mexican human-rights group in conjunction with Witness, opens with a mother haltingly describing July 14, 2004, the day she had to identify the body of her daughter Neyra, who had disappeared more than a year earlier.

Neyra is one of more than 450 women who, since 1993, have been found murdered in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City, Mexico, with many of the bodies showing signs of brutal sexual violence. More than 4,000 other women have been reported missing.

But the video also tells of the second tragedy that befell the family. Soon after Neyra’s body was found, her cousin, who had traveled from southern Mexico to join in the search for her, was jailed as a suspect in the murder. He says that he was tortured to confess to the crime.

The video proved to be a key tool in the campaign by the charity that produced it — Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos — to raise awareness about the murders, local authorities’ inaction, and what the group believed was the torture of innocent people in response to public pressure to solve the crimes. The short film intersperses interviews with the mother and cousin with family videos of a laughing, smiling Neyra.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission viewed the video, and it was shown in a series of screenings in Europe, the United States, and Mexico, with a message urging viewers to write to Mexican officials asking for the release of Neyra’s cousin.

A few days after meeting with the Comisión Mexicana, the attorney general for the state of Chihuahua announced that evidence acquired through torture was inadmissible, and that charges in the case might be dropped for lack of evidence. A few months later, Neyra’s cousin was free after nearly three years in jail waiting for a judge’s ruling.

The video helped the organization explain the problems in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City clearly and succinctly to decision makers, says Mario Solorzano, legal program director at the Comisión Mexicana. “In only 17 minutes, they could get all the problem and some points of the solution,” rather than having to read hundreds of pages of documents, says Mr. Solorzano.

Technology Tools

Creating a distribution channel for advocacy videos is a new step for Witness. But Mr. Gabriel, the group’s founder, says Witness has always responded to changes in technology.

“Initially, the fact that there were comparatively lightweight videocameras and laptop computers meant there was a chance for small human-rights groups to be in the business of communicating with the world directly,” says Mr. Gabriel.

The rapid spread of mobile phones that can record video means that helping human-rights advocates get their messages out is more important than ever, especially in the developing world, he says.

But it’s not enough to encourage those activists to post their material to a commercial video-sharing site, says Gillian Caldwell, who was executive director of Witness for nearly a decade until she left last week to take a job at a climate-change group.

Instead, Ms. Caldwell says, such groups need a space on the Internet dedicated solely to human rights.

Witness plans to feature on its site human-rights footage that has been posted on YouTube and elsewhere. But, by and large, says Ms. Caldwell, the material that has been posted on commercial video-sharing sites hasn’t fared well.

“It’s often mischaracterized or mis-tagged and may even, at times, be the brunt of jokes, which is very disturbing to people who are placing their lives at risk to get it on there,” she says.

In recognition of the security risks activists face, the Hub allows people to post anonymously.

Witness will encourage it in cases in which the sensitive nature of the material could result in “very swift and severe retaliation,” says Ms. Caldwell. “Obviously, if you’re working in China, for example, you are at risk. You could face incarceration or much worse as a result of uploading this content.”

The site also provides an easy-to-understand explanation of which security risks can be mitigated and which cannot, and it offers advice on how activists can protect themselves.

Activists, for example, can mask their physical location as they upload their material to the Internet by transfering their materials to a “proxy server” before moving them to the Hub. Witness also advises activists to be sure to clear their browser history after they have uploaded material, especially if they are using a computer in an Internet café.

$1.2-Million Estimate

So far, the cost of building the system has been about $150,000, and the organization estimates the total cost of the project will be at least $1.2-million over the first three years.

According to Ms. Caldwell, Witness still needs to raise money to incorporate additional features into the Hub. Eventually, the organization wants to make tools available that would allow users to edit the footage that they upload to the site, incorporate mapping technology and the ability to send faxes, and offer the site in many more languages.

Right now, the site’s instructions, navigation, and advice are available in English, Spanish, and French. By the end of the year, the organization hopes to add Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to the need for translation, the fact that those languages have very different scripts and, in some cases, are read right to left poses programming challenges as well.

For now, Witness will be screening all of the material submitted to the Hub before it is posted live, except for material from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

If staff members identify material that is particularly sensitive and might endanger the people shown in the video, they will take steps to protect their identities, such as blurring or pixelating their faces or distorting their voices.

The screening process will also weed out pornography, material that isn’t related to human rights, and content that infringes on copyright or intellectual-property rights.

In time, however, Witness hopes that it will be able to build an active, engaged online audience that would help analyze and monitor material added to the site. At that point, material would go live as soon as it was uploaded, and users would flag videos that might need to be taken down.

Either way, Witness cannot vouch for the authenticity of the material posted on the site, says Ms. Caldwell.

“In a context like this, where we anticipate, hopefully, thousands if not tens of thousands of uploads a year — and maybe ultimately much more than that — we absolutely could not go through the process of verifying each and every piece of content, and that wouldn’t be our role,” she says.

What Witness will do, she says, is explain the steps the organization has taken to verify the authenticity of videos it features prominently on the Hub.

Close Affiliations

While Witness hopes that the Hub will garner submissions from a wide variety of human-rights groups and activists, it also sees the new site as a valuable venue for the organizations with which it already has close ties.

At any given time, Witness is working with 12 to 15 human-rights groups on campaigns that usually last one to three years. The organization also conducts short-term training sessions on the use of video for human rights and social justice. Nearly 640 activists from more than 70 countries took part in 2006.

One of Witness’s partners, the Association des Jeunes Pour le Développement Intégré-Kalundu, or Ajedi-Ka, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, began filming former child soldiers talking about their experiences as a way to educate people in remote villages about the dangers that child combatants face.

After several years of working to win the release of child soldiers from militia groups, Bukeni T. Waruzi, Ajedi-Ka’s founder, says he realized that the young people his group had helped to liberate were keeping the hardships they had endured to themselves.

“Children don’t really tell to their parents what has happened to them in the [military] camps, and the parents, they don’t have that courage to ask their children about their stories, about what has happened there,” says Mr. Waruzi.

In the chaos and instability of war and without access to outside information from television, newspapers, or, in some cases, even radio, some parents still encouraged their children to join the militias as an act of patriotism, he says.

So Ajedi-Ka created a video, On the Frontlines, in which former child soldiers talked about military life. The group shows the film in villages in the eastern part of the country.

Listening to children talk about what it was like to see friends being killed, arduous living conditions in the camps, and, in the case of the girls, sexual exploitation, helped change many people’s attitudes, and has cut down on voluntary recruitment, says Mr. Waruzi.

Ajedi-Ka’s collaboration with Witness helped the organization raise awareness of the issue of child soldiers beyond the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A second video, Duty to Protect, was shown at the Hague and in meetings between Ajedi-Ka and officials at the International Criminal Court, which last year indicted a militia leader, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, on charges related to the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

The cost of activism has been steep for Mr. Waruzi. Since he started working on behalf of child soldiers in 1998, he has been arrested four times and beaten twice. This year, the threats against him became so great that he had to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since September, he has been working in New York as Witness’s program coordinator for Africa and the Middle East.

Yet Mr. Waruzi remains committed to fighting injustices, and believes that video is a powerful tool in the hands of human-rights defenders.

“These are truth stories,” he says. “You watch and you listen. You see the victim. You can even share the pain when you are watching their stories on the video. Wherever you are, you can understand and take action.”