Meeting of Organizations from the Region Documenting Human Rights Violations

A consultative meeting 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 1990’s was held on February 4^th, 2016, in the Library of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC). 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), the Engine Room (Croatia), Sandžak Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms (Serbia), the HLC and HLC Kosovo participated in this meeting.

The meeting represents part of a global initiative in which the HLC is participating, called “Human Rights Documentation Toolkit”, which has the objective to identify, analyze and present various practices in the field of documentation of human rights violations in the world, for the purpose of providing support to civil society organizations which are only starting their work on documentation, particularly in areas currently affected by crisis situations. A part of this project is going to be the development of an internet page with a variety of resources and materials, which will be helpful for civil society organizations dealing with documentation.

The participants presented their work and the methodologies used in the process of documenting human rights violations, as well as the basic issues, challenges and lessons awareness of which may assist other organizations in the region and the world.