Information is of strategic importance to all human rights organisations. Information leads to a deeper understanding of the human rights situation, of patterns and trends, of the consequences for victims, of the root causes. Information helps identify the appropriate remedies and solutions to prevent abuses and improve understanding and respect for human rights.

It is vital that human rights information is actionable. This means it should be accessible: the right information should reach the right people, when and where they need it. It should be usable: information should be presented in such as way as to facilitate analysis and decision-making. It should be compatible, to increase levels of sharing and improve communication and collaboration.

Standards are essential to ensure that information is actionable. They provide common approach and a common language to make sure that information collected by one organisation can be shared with others, used by others, accessed by others.

Without common standards, information management is haphazard and chaotic. Retrieval is unreliable and vital elements are lost. It is difficult to share and compare. This makes communication inefficient, ineffective and confusing.

The HURIDOCS network has developed standards for human rights information management, and provides tools and training to help human rights organisations implement them. This makes their information more actionable, their communication more efficient, and directly helps them reach their goals and bring about positive change.

Standards for monitoring and documentation of violations

The Events approach to documentation makes it possible to break a violation down into its various components. An event contains acts, and persons with various roles: victim, perpetrator, source, intervening party.

HURIDOCS has developed Standard Formats, which together with the Micro-thesauri enables a sytematic description of each of these components. The Evsys database system brings it all together, making it possible to record violations correctly and making it easy to produce analysis and statistics on these violations: statistics by type of violation, by perpetrator, by victim characteristics, by geographic area, by time period, by result of intervention, and so on.

This systematic approach ensures a common language so that information related to violations can be pooled or shared, in order to facilitate a common analysis of the human rights situation.

Together with AAAS, HURIDOCS has also produced tools and techniques to monitor economic, social and cultural rights.

Standards for human rights documentation centres

Human rights organisations often use documentation centres as an effective way of providing knowledge to the communities they serve, thus empowering them. Librarians index and catalogue books and documents, so users can find what they need, easily and reliably.

HURIDOCS has developed manuals and trainings which can teach human rights workers who often do not have an education as librarian in with the essentials of cataloguing, indexing and managing a human rights documentation centre. The tools are based upon and compatible with general library standards, which were simplified to facilitate their use.

Standards for disseminating information online

The internet is an increasingly important arena for human rights advocacy and communication. It vital that human rights information published on the internet is retrievable, meaning that it will actually be found by the person looking for it, and not lost like a needle in a haystack.

The HuriSearch human rights search engine provides a one-stop access point to information published by the human rights community itself. It prominently displays relevant pages by smaller organisations, which often produce very relevant first-hand information. These important sources are often lost by the larger search engines.

Meta-data are standards used to facilitate the retrieval of digital information: web pages, electronic documents, digital media. HURIDOCS also provides human rights webmasters with guidance on how to make systematic better use of meta-data, to ensure that the information they publish is easily retrievable by information users, for example via search engines.