Information Technology, Information Management, and Human Rights: A Response to Metzl

I. Introduction

The November 1996 edition of Human Rights Quarterly carried an article by Dr. Jamie F. Metzl entitled “Information Technology and Human Rights.” ¹ In the article, Dr. Metzl provided a broad overview of the history of communication technology as it has evolved into information technology during the past century. He explained how information technology has positively and, in a few cases, negatively affected human rights work.

The authors of this article appreciate Dr. Metzl’s work in this area. Information technology offers a number of new opportunities and challenges to the human rights community, and it is good to see that they are increasingly being addressed by human rights scholars and practitioners. The authors’ concern, however, is that at several points in his article Dr. Metzl made factual errors that may mislead human rights groups trying to evaluate the benefits and risks posed by the use of information technology. Furthermore, the authors have reservations about several of Dr. Metzl’s recommendations that arise both from his factual errors and from his failure to recognize that many of the problems he identified are already being addressed by existing groups.

Many of these recommendations are informed by several basic, and common, misunderstandings about the nature of human rights organizations and the different roles that information technology can play in their work. Throughout his article, Dr. Metzl implied that there are primarily two kinds of human rights organizations: small, grassroots groups in the global South, and large, internationally focused groups in the North. His recommendations about how human rights organizations should be using information technology ignored the broad range of groups that fall between these two, their disparate information needs, and the wide variety of tasks to which they can and do apply information technologies.

This misunderstanding is further complicated by his representation of information technology solely as an information gathering and dissemination tool. The increase in information technology has indeed led to a fabulous expansion of information gathering and communication capabilities, but it also vastly increased human rights groups’ ability to make sense of the information they already have. Improved computers and software greatly expand the ability of human rights organizations in the field to uncover and analyze patterns and trends in ongoing or historical violations.

This response is organized into two main sections. Section II outlines three issues of fact and definition that the authors believe Dr. Metzl overlooked: differences between groups in different sectors of the human rights community; the distinction between information management and information technology; and the application of cryptography to human rights work. Section III addresses Dr. Metzl’s recommendations, specifically his suggestions that groups work to expand international law regarding access to information, that groups develop guidelines for human rights information exchange, and that groups provide training in information technology. The discussion concludes with a consideration of new challenges that information technologies pose to the protection of human rights.

II. Questions of Definition and Technical Use

A. Respecting the Different Information Needs of Different Kinds of Human Rights Organizations

Dr. Metzl’s article implied that the primary distinction among human rights groups in the world, at least as it applies to their use of information technology, is that between heavily resourced groups in the North and groups at the grassroots. ² In the authors’ experience, groups at different positions in the human rights community have fundamentally divergent—and occasionally incompatible—information needs. Groups’ information needs may be influenced by their resource levels, but they are not determined by resources.

On the basis of experience, the authors would distinguish between the following kinds of human rights organizations: 1) governmental human rights bodies (e.g., the Honduran Human Rights Commissioner); 2) inter-governmental and regional organizations (e.g., UN Human Rights Missions, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights); 3) international nongovernmental organizations (e.g., HURIDOCS, Amnesty International); 4) regional, national, or local nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, the Society for Community Organization in Hong Kong, and the International Center for Human Rights Research-Guatemala); and...