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July 1998 |
The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library
http://www.umn.edu/humanrts/
The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library has the distinction of being one of the first human rights websites; for years it has been providing researches, students and activists with invaluable human rights information. It is also one of the most extensive and well organized ones, and one of the ones we consult the most.
The focus of the Human Rights Library is providing reference materials on human rights. It has the most complete list of human rights and international humanitarian law instruments available online, which includes both international as well as regional materials in English, French and Spanish. It includes a section thoroughly covering the work of the UN and Inter-American human rights systems. Here you can find the reports and resolutions issued by the different bodies and their decisions in contentious cases. This is particularly useful as, in the case of the treaty bodies and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the information is not available elsewhere online. Easy to use, and subject-specific search engines, make looking for the information you seek very easy.
Another very useful, and unique, section is the one on US human rights material. Here you can find all sorts of human rights information related to the US, including legislation, the human rights treaties to which the US is a party (and its reservations to them), US reports to the UN Committee on Human Rights, links to other pertinent websites, and even some asylum jurisprudence. Reports on country situations from the INS Asylum Resource Information Center are also available from the asylum and refugee section.
An important part of the site, and an essential tool for all teachers, is the human rights education section. It contains full copies of the Amnesty International USA Fourth R newsletter on human rights education, which contains both articles discussing the issues and practical suggestions on how to approach different human rights topics in the classroom. This section also contains a pertinent biography, curriculum suggestion and links. More human rights educations materials are available from their "Partners in Human Rights Education" section.
A newer part of the site, the Peace Resource Center, provides ample information on humanitarian law, including international humanitarian law and peace instruments, recent peace accords, the statutes of the international criminal tribunals, and links to peace and activist sites.
The Human Rights Library also contains a very complete and well-organized section on links to other human rights web sites. If you are looking for something specific, this is a good place to start your search.
The Human Rights Library is very well-organized, and you can easily find your way to any document you seek from the menu in its main page. The only caveats worth mentioning are that decisions from international bodies are not always immediately posted to the Library (for example the last contentious cases from the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights available are from 1996), so for recent materials you may have to resort to getting paper copies from the bodies themselves. While most documents are available on HTML, and thus you can easily access them with your web browser, some are only available in PDF format - which means that you must download a free Acrobat Reader to read them.
All in all, the University of Minnesota Human Rights library is a clear example of what a wonderful tool the web can be for human rights activist and researchers alike.
