January 21, 2008 · 02:32 PM

Inconvenient Stories

What does the inconvenient truth look like? How can it be brought to light? Which methods and approaches are necessary to inform people about things that some groups are just too likely to cover up?

Kenneth Roth is director of Human Rights Watch, one of the most important human rights organisation worldwide.

Roth will be interviewed by Kara Swisher. She is the leading technology columnist in the USA and writes for the Wall Street Journal.

Kenneth Roth explains the work of Human Rights Watch: "When your human rights are violated, your first reaction would be: Sue the bastard. We work in a different context, where there is no place to sue anyone, because the judges are all in jail."

"We have a network of correspondents in many countries where human rights are not respected. We call them "researchers". They interview victims and publish reports. We circulate these reports through the net and also through traditional media. Of course, governments fight this - they do not want to appear in such a negative light. They run gigantic PR campaigns to make our reports look implausible.

But ultimately, these countries realize that PR tactics won't help them much. This is when they have to reconsider their humans rights practices, and we can make a difference."

For example: Washington Post had a front page story about secret CIA detention camps. But the editors did not name the countries that supported the CIA, because the CIA "asked them not to".

"Human rights watch did some research and shortly named: Poland and Romania. This information was gathered from flight logs - we told an "inconvenient story" and the US government was forced to shut down theses facilities."

Question: "Have things changed for you since the internet's rise to power? Has it changed the way you distribute information?"

"Yes, I remember when our researchers would 'disappear' in certain countries. When they turned up again, they had to fax their reports to the press."

So the net improved the distribution. We get our information out very quickly.

And dictators are aware of this: Burma for example shut down the net as soon as the protests broke out.

Question: "Right now, a lot of the stuff on YouTube is cats on skateboards. Will user-generated content be a reliable source to document human right violations?"

There was a video from Egypt: a busdriver was beaten up. The video was filmed by regular people, not by journalists. It was distributed virally and millions of people saw it.

Question: What tools do you use?

We go with video cameras and laptops - we want to get out the information out as soon as possible. We are careful about not disclosing the identity of our sources. When we publish a picture of someone being beaten up, you can see the victim. But we do not want that people know who took the picture.

Question:
In China, U.S. companies get in trouble because they release information about people who posted critical comments about the government.

It is good that Western companies are in China, yet they have to consider:

- How can the need of handing out information to the government be avoided, if this could get people to prison?
- How can censorship - if not banned - at be least minimized?

One way could be (Google already does that) to have the servers outside of the country.

Companies currently use a model that can be called "anticipatory self-censorship". Google, for example, tries to find out which pages the Chinese government blocks. Then Google blocks these pages as well and keeps a list of these key words. We want the companies to release these lists because this would help us to understand how Chinese online censorship, the infamous "Great Firewall of China", works. Yet, companies do not want to release these lists of critical keywords.

Question: What is needed to improve the quality of your website?

We want to use more multimedia. Right now, we are very text-based. And it is heavy text, very detailed reports. That is great to be taken seriously, but it is not really accessible to the public.

Our website is full of videos and pictures, and we want to have more of this. But there is also an editorial staff who checks the information and gives additional information.

Question: What parts of the world currently need attention?:

1) Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf is taking a big PR tour right now - he wants us to believe that everything is great, and that the upcoming election will be alright. In fact he has dismissed the Supreme Court and replaced the judges with people who support his government.

2) Burma - people are already forgetting about it.

3) Darfur - a long-term problem. A UN peacekeeping team is going to help there, but not as many people as needed. They need 20,000 peacekeepers, only 8,000 are coming there

One big thing is: People do not look at problematic parts of the world long enough - their attention quickly moves to a different matter. This does not leave enough time to build serious pressure on regimes. Oftentimes, human rights violations are looked upon as temporary violations, but the overall situation in the country is okay. Unfortunately, this is often not true.

Question: Which role do blogs play to give people an impression about the situation in foreign countries?

Blogs are a critical way to get information out. The press has cut on foreign correspondents - often bloggers take their spot. If we want to know about foreign countries, we have to read blogs from there.

Mainstream media use is declining. So for us, both bloggers and traditional media are amplifying our cause.

 

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