Summary
The Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, an NGO that helps human rights groups gather, organise and use information, with which Jonathan Kuttab worked from its 1982 founding assembly until 2009 (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.78-79).
Details
- At the 1982 Strasbourg founding assembly Kuttab was proposed, almost by accident as he tells it, as delegate for the Middle East group on its governing Council; this was probably LSM’s first contact with the developing Arab human rights movement (PDF p.78).
- Kuttab’s role was bringing up the field activists’ need for proper documentation tools and the philosophy of documentation, drawing on Al-Haq’s experience (PDF p.79).
- At a 1986 meeting with HURIDOCS and other conveners an al-Haq representative criticized “the exclusive use of bibliographically-based programs”; a compromise allowed al-Haq and similar organizations to link to the central system without fundamentally changing how they stored and retrieved data (PDF p.88).
- In 1988 al-Haq joined the HURIDOCS “taskforce to produce standard formats for recording human rights events” (PDF p.88).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Jonathan Kuttab, Charles Shammas