Be a Blogger for Human Rights

I came across a Joi Ito post today about how he's joined the board of WITNESS, an incredible nonprofit that helps other nonprofits and NGOs to use video to document, create educational materials about and advocate against human rights abuses. You can read case studies of how their videos have made a difference here.

Anyway, he mentioned that he set up a Typepad blog for Witness' Director, Gillian Caldwell to document her trip to Sierra Leone with Angelina Jolie to deliver recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to the government.

While searching for examples of other women using blogs to document human rights abuses, I found Human Rights Watch, an NGO that investigates and exposes human rights violations and hold abusers accountable.

One of their calls to action, is to be a "Blogger for Human Rights":

If you are a blogger, you can use your bully pulpit to stand with the victims and activists to prevent discrimination, uphold political freedom, protect people from inhumane treatment in wartime, and campaign to bring offenders to justice. You can expose human rights violations and hold abusers accountable. You can challenge governments and those who hold power to end abusive practices and respect international human rights law.

They provide RSS feeds about human rights issues classified by region, country and theme, and e-mail newsletters in several languages. They also ask people to tag post about human rights with the tag " human rights." Finally, the site directs bloggers to the Electric Frontier Foundation site for tips on how to blog anonymously, if necessary.

So sign up for those feeds, and start blogging for human rights!


blogging
human rights