In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Human Rights Quarterly 23.2 (2001) 431-463



[Access article in PDF]

Human Rights: A Survey of Archival Sources in the United States and Canada

Bruce P. Montgomery


In the post World War II war era, the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany have given rise to a historically unprecedented international human rights movement that now comprises thousands of organizations worldwide. As monitors and investigators of human rights abuses, these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have left a vast and vitally important trail of largely uncollected archival documentation covering many of the seminal international political and human rights events in the later twentieth century. What will become of this evidence, and what the loss or destruction of this evidence would portend are important questions.

An obvious imperative exists not only to preserve human rights archival documentation for scholarship, but also for historical accountability and memory. The only beneficiaries of the loss of this evidence are the perpetrators themselves. In this respect, human rights NGOs and others have a substantial obligation in seeing that the human rights record is preserved. In addition to preserving the voices of individual victims and survivors, it is necessary for historical accountability to retain the perpetrators' memories. Because of the past frequent inability or unwillingness of the world community to bring perpetrators to justice, perhaps the only the long-term human rights tribunal will be the historical verdict. NGOs should thus not do for human rights abusers what such perpetrators and authoritarian regimes have not been able to do for themselves by permitting the record of [End Page 431] human rights atrocities to be irretrievably lost. This survey, then, is in order to discuss the extent to which human rights archives have actually been collected and preserved, what issues they entail, and where these sources may be found.

Despite the human rights movement's global presence and influence, contemporary international human rights NGOs remain curiously under-documented in research universities in the United States and throughout the world. A thorough search of national and international library and academic databases and printed sources, for example, will reveal that universities and other educational or cultural institutions have very little in the way of human rights primary documentation. Several reasons appear to explain this situation. First, until recently many NGOs have considered their investigative data far too sensitive to turn over to external institutions. NGOs have been concerned that access to interviews, testimonies, field notes, and other evidence regarding violations of human rights by governments or armed groups would pose significant risks to individual lives, perhaps to the point of causing intergenerational retribution in cases involving countries with the most extreme and long standing records of abuse. For this reason alone, in the 1970s Amnesty International (AI) instituted a policy that called for the destruction of case files once they became inactive. The problem, however, was that while such a policy may have seemed prudent in protecting their sources and other individuals, it initiated a process of systematic destruction of both the record of AI's work and the memory of individuals on whose behalf AI had intervened. This policy remained in effect until 1994 when AI's London headquarters office decided to allow national sections to archive internal materials with external institutions. 1

A second reason for the lack of preservation of human rights documentation is that research archives and libraries in leading universities have been slow in recognizing the importance of human rights as a significant sociopolitical issue requiring serious attention. This oversight has occurred despite the vast and rapidly growing scholarly literature on human rights produced especially within the last fifteen to twenty years. Once the primary domain of scholars in international law and political science, human rights has now become a topic of intense study for numerous academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, because of the relative scarcity of archival materials on the human rights [End Page 432] movement little has been written on international NGOs themselves or on their enormous influence concerning foreign policy and world affairs.

Third, most research archives confront serious...

pdf

Share