The Section on Archives and Human Rights (SAHR) of the International Council on Archives is pleased to take part in the celebrations of United Nations’ International Human Rights Day, established to commemorate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Declaration which has served as the foundation for the protection of fundamental human rights, justice, and equity. Working with many long standing partners, SAHR consistently promotes the important role of archives and archivists in support of human rights and has released several publications, including the Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in Support of Human Rights (2016), the special issue of the ICA journal Comma on Archives and Human Rights (2020) and “Archives and Human Rights” book (2021) in English, French and Spanish in addition to the generally acclaimed regular monthly newsletter collating a wide range of news items relating to archives and human rights from all over the world for over 13 years.
To make this 75th Anniversary special, SAHR is launching an online Knowledge Base called “Rights and Records”, a practical tool to help building knowledge, skills and capacity among professional archivists for managing archives with human rights implications. This tool developed with the 2022 PCOM fund for project makes available more than 2000 key references through a user-friendly interface in English. It includes references in their original language (Arabic, Czech, English, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish); a diversity of formats including books, blog articles, newspapers articles, podcasts and journal articles (referenced but not always digitally accessible due to copyright).
The Rights and Records Knowledge Base is available through the SAHR web page on the ICA website https://rightsandrecords.ica.org/bib/ and will be regularly updated with news items collected for the section’s monthly newsletters.
On 10th December 2023 at 16.00 (Paris time), the section is organizing a talk with Trudy Huskamp Peterson on the close relationship between archival materials and selected articles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights which will be followed by a brief launch of the Rights and Records Knowledge Base.
The session is free and open to all with prior registration here.