Gillian Caldwell, New York A new advocacy tool for human rights defenders: the video camera. WITNESS - an international human rights program
- In 1992, WITNESS set out to arm human rights activists with a new and untried advocacy tool: the video camera. The first stage of the program’s development was devoted to putting as many cameras into the hands of as many local activists as possible. After equipping them, WITNESS set out to train the activists in camera techniques and the vocabulary of international human rights standards. In this way, advocacy groups learned how to integrate video strategies into their work so that human rights abuses, that might otherwise go unnoticed, would be documented and punished.
WITNESS has over 100 partners in more than 40 countries around the world including the U.S. Our partners work on a wide array of human rights issues - police brutality, trafficking in women, child labor, and collecting forensic evidence of war crimes. Footage captured by our partner groups has resulted in changes in governments’ policies and practices, been used as evidence against war criminals and been broadcast to international audiences to raise awareness of human rights abuses, via CNN, BBC, and network television.
With a significant number of groups now equipped and trained in video advocacy fundamentals, the program moved on to a new stage of its development: achieving results in terms of safeguarding human rights. Through trainings and intensive working partnerships WITNESS has cultivated strong ties with NGOs that have yielded a large quantity of high-quality video footage. The footage is being used in increasingly sophisticated and effective ways, by activists and broadcast news organizations, to raise public awareness about human rights and to reform public policy.
Please visit our web site at www.witness.org to become informed thoroughly about our WITNESS and current activities.
Training local NGOs
Early experience showed us that simply having a camera was not sufficient to ensure that partners would be able to obtain the best footage to make their cases. Therefore, training became a critical component of WITNESS. Now, when groups receive cameras and other equipment, we provide training that combines hands-on practice with written and video training material.
Recently WITNESS conducted field training in Ghana for human rights and humanitarian groups operating in West Africa. The training guided groups through the process of making advocacy videos. Partners got step-by-step instruction - from "camera basics", for those who have never operated a video camera, to advanced storytelling techniques and strategic guidance. This intensive workshop format has proven successful in transferring the sophisticated skills necessary to solidify local NGO commitment to video advocacy as a means to advance human rights.
At these types of trainings WITNESS screens partner videos, participants discuss the effectiveness of each in relationship to the organizations’ stated human rights objectives, engage in a critical review of their own video material, and make recommendations for turning raw video footage into useful human rights tools. Then each organization prepares a "Video Action Plan" for completing a video advocacy project. Each plan sets out the policy, broadcast, and grassroots education/organizing goals they expect to achieve and establishes benchmarks against which progress can be measured.
We have produced training videos and manuals that local groups can use to strengthen their advocacy and win ground in their struggles with authorities. The most comprehensive video, Video for Change is a video and corresponding guide available in French, Spanish and English in its final stages of post-production. When it is complete, the video will be made available to local groups. It will also be accessible through our website in a downloadable digital format to ensure widest distribution. We are now finalizing an associated written training manual that is aimed at helping human rights organizations use video in a variety of ways to achieve strategic advocacy objectives: producing footage that can be entered into evidence, televised as part of national or international news stories, incorporated into documentary films, screened before UN treaty bodies, or streamed online via the Internet with associated urgent actions.
New partners
This year, 25 new partner groups from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Mexico, India, Kosovo, Bolivia, Cambodia, Israel, Eritrea, United Kingdom, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the United States were equipped, and trained in the fundamentals of video advocacy. WITNESS partners are tackling a wide range of issues from the protection of refugees in Iran, to documenting the conditions of children engaged in combat in Sri Lanka, to demanding economic justice in the United States.
Our intern/extern program has grown considerably in the last year. As part of our effort to transfer skills to partners, develop new leadership in the human rights arena, and to mainstream the human rights dialog, we have enlisted a number of volunteers. WITNESS staff conduct dozens of presentations each year to educate high school and college students about the program. As a result, many students work with us earning both academic and community service credits.
Our volunteer pool also includes highly skilled professionals - videographers, lawyers, journalists, web designers, video editors - who apply their expertise to our work and guide inexperienced staff and interns through some of the specialized areas of video advocacy. In the last year, we have also located volunteers with WITNESS partners overseas, in Mexico, Argentina, and Israel.
Changing the face of human rights advocacy
The following program highlights demonstrate the impact WITNESS is making in the human rights field and the potential of video to enhance, and even surpass, the printed word as an agent of change.
- Combating the international sex trade
- Policing the police
- Holding governments accountable before the UN
- Exposing the abuses of mental patients
Rapid response
Aside from the established partnership building and training that WITNESS undertakes, on occasion, it intervenes in emergency situations where a rapid response of a technological nature could have a significant positive impact on human rights conditions.
In May 1999, prior to the negotiated peace agreement, WITNESS staff flew to Albania to equip and train four Kosovar Albanians to document human rights conditions in Kosovo by capturing human rights violations and witness testimonies on video. During this mission WITNESS tested its prototype for transmitting digitized images during hostilities via satellite communication and the Internet.
The WITNESS partners videotaped interviews with eyewitnesses to several massacres. This testimonial evidence is being put to use by the International War Crimes Tribunal and they are now available to international and local broadcast TV and to filmmakers for use in documentary productions. The footage will be incorporated into a video installation on refugees at the Immigrant Museum in Boston, and the interviews were incorporated into Human Rights Watch’s October 1999 report "A Village Destroyed: War Crimes in Kosovo" , which is being distributed worldwide.
WITNESS also provided a satellite telephone to the Uwa tribe of Colombia in their struggle to prevent multinational company Occidental Petroleum from drilling in their ancestral homelands. The phone was a critical lifeline to the outside world during the very tense standoff in the Spring of 2000, in which Columbian troops were called in to enforce the order authorizing drilling and the Uwa were threatening mass suicide in response to the pending action.
Technology and online programming
As part of its strategy to provide an Internet broadcast platform for partner videos, WITNESS has established a strong presence on the web. On March 9, 2000 we launched "WITNESS Rights Alert (http://www.witness.org) a bi-weekly series produced by Oddcast and broadcast on Apple's QuickTime TV (QTV). The original online documentaries and exposés, shot by WITNESS partners, are hosted by our celebrity supporters including Angelique Kijdo, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and accompanied by music and audio introductions by Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Michael Stipe, and Peter Gabriel. Current features include:
The Global Survival Network investigated and exposed the Russian mafia’s scheme to recruit young women with the promise of jobs into forced prostitution in the United States. The images prompted broad media coverage and legislative action in several countries to stop illegal trade in human beings.
Children at War documents the abduction of 139 girls from a boarding school in Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army. This film, introduced by West African musician Angelique Kidjo, was featured in "WITNESS Rights Alert", our new human rights series on Apple’s Quick Time TV.
Sanamacha’s Story, introduced on WITNESS Rights Alert by actor and Director Tim Robbins, is the video story of the kidnapping of a Manipuri teenager by India’s military. It was shown to UN officials who have demanded accountability from India’s government, and viewings in Manipur have catalyzed local activism for demilitarizing their homeland.
The Empire’s New Clothes is a 10-minute online video exposé about conditions in New York City sweatshops narrated by Susan Sarandon. The film documents the garment industry’s exploitation of undocumented women workers here in the United States.
Each video feature has a corresponding action component that allows web site visitors to weigh-in on the issues and contact those in authority who can favorably influence the situation. Since broadcasting began, the Rights Alert is generating up to 15,000 web site hits daily.
Creating a worldwide audience for human rights reporting
Broadcast and media coverage of the human rights issues WITNESS and its partners expose has increased dramatically. Through WorldLinkTV - an international, interactive, television channel that brings world events, issues and cultures to audiences in the United States - WITNESS programs now reach 11,000,000 homes. Focused on issues of public interest, WorldLinkTV isbroadcasting the series TRIUMPH OVER TERROR. This WITNESS - TVE co-production is available via DIRECTV and DISH Network (see www.worldlink.com for programming schedules).
A selection of projects in development and upcoming activities
WITNESS is preparing a five-minute video that will be installed as a permanent feature in the new immigrant museum in Boston as part of an exhibit on refugees. The video will Focus on refugee movements worldwide and the human rights abuses that give rise to these mass migrations.
WITNESS is co-producing a thirty-minute documentary with the Arab Association for Human Rights (AAHR), a Palestinian Arab NGO group located in Israel that works to promote and protect the political, civil, economic, and cultural rights of the Palestinian Arab minority. The project focuses on discrimination and human rights violations committed by the Israeli government against the million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. The film will document the conditions in mixed Arab/Jewish cities in Israel paying particular attention to the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize Arab villages in the Galilee and Negev Deserts as well as the situation of internally displaced refugees.
WITNESS is also working with NYC PoliceWatch, to develop and distribute a one-hour documentary about misconduct and excessive use of force, particularly in communities of color, by police in New York City. The stories of three survivors of police brutality will form the core of the video. Other victims of abuse, a former or current police official who can offer perspective from within the police department, and a community member who is standing against abuse and seeking solutions to the problem will also be featured. With original and archival footage, the project intends to underscore the importance of community organizing to address this human rights issue.
WITNESS and the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice are collaborating to produce a video documentary that makes clear that women’s rights are human rights. The video will provide the historical background that has finally led to the recognition that gender violence is a category of human rights abuse that can and should be prosecuted. Through the stories of survivors of gender crimes, the video and its accompanying training manual will document the personal and systemic damage caused by gender violence and the healing that is possible through legal recourse, particularly the International Criminal Court treaty.
WITNESS is working with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, based in Philadelphia. KWRU is dedicated to organizing welfare recipients, the homeless, the working poor, and all people concerned with economic justice. KWRU's legal committee recently submitted a petition to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights claiming that the United States government’s welfare reform policies, in particular the 1996 Personal Responsibility And Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, have violated the KWRU members’ economic and social rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To support its claim, the legal committee plans to submit evidence that will include video testimonies and documentation.
Impact and future growth
Expanding and strengthening our regional partnerships depends on cultivating the financial resources to fuel new growth. Our fundraising goal for the coming year is ambitious — raising one million dollars in new support. But we have already made headway with both individuals and foundations and are confident that, with increased public awareness of our human rights objectives, WITNESS will garner the support necessary to fully fund existing projects and to launch new initiatives. «
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Short biographical note
Gillian Caldwell,
the first full-time director of WITNESS, is a lawyer who specializes in international human rights, civil rights, and family law. At various non-governmental organizations around the world, she has worked directly on a range of rights issues including worldwide migration policies, torture, women´s rights, trafficking in women, and disability discrimination. Before coming to WITNESS, she worked at the Global Survival Network (GSN), a WITNESS partner. As the Co-Director of GSN, she coordinated a two-year undercover investigation into the trafficking of women for forced prostitution from Russia and the Newly Independent States, and produced a documentary film based on the investigation which received widespread coverage on CNN, BBC and ABC News. She is fluent in Spanish.
Gillian Caldwell
Director, WITNESS
c/o Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
333 Seventh Avenue,
13th Floor
New York, NY 10001-5004
Phone 001 212 845-5252,
Fax. 001 212 845-5299
Email caldwellg@lchr.org
URL http://www.witness.org
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Citation Gillian Caldwell, A new advocacy tool for human rights defenders: the video camera. WITNESS - an international human rights program. In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL TraumaResearch.net/focus1/cald.htm
Copyright © 2000, Gillian Caldwell and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the trauma newsletter. For other permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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