Commentary: News at 10!
It began this way: At the 2009 meeting of the International Council on Archives, national archivists were wary of the 6-year-old Human Rights Working Group. They seemed fear that if a body with the ICA’s name pointed to human rights abuses by governments, it would make it difficult for them to continue supporting ICA. As the incoming chair of the HRWG, I took the stage at the annual business meeting and promised that the Group would look at human rights issues in all sectors of society, not just governments. The way I thought to keep my word was to send out regular reports about human rights in international news. I put out the first issue of HRWG News in December 2009 which, as you look at the issue number above, means this issue completes a 10-year run of monthly releases.
That first issue was only two pages in length, and it announced that the next issues of the newsletter would discuss the Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and highlight examples of records essential to exercise those rights; those became commentary topics through July 2012. The next set of commentaries focused on the Principles of Access to Archives, which the ICA adopted at its August 2012 annual meeting. Since that run was completed in June 2013, the commentary has simply focused on a topic in the news. To mark the 10-year anniversary, a list of commentary topics will be posted to the SAHR website. The compilation of the commentaries on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I issued in 2018 for the 70th anniversary of the UDHR, can be found there also.
Early on I began to separate items into sections for international, general, bilateral/multilateral, and national news. Individual country and bilateral items form the most prominent part of the News; over 150 countries have been featured at least once in the 10 years. But increasingly human rights in business and in medical treatment and the related records have assumed greater importance in the coverage. I always include news from international organizations, as that information is often lacking or buried in national news media yet has broad impact.
Deciding how to characterize a news item is difficult. Do you, for example, think an item on how DNA is used in research on criminal cases should be listed under privacy, technology or medical news? Is an item on the war in Yemen part of the general wars in the Middle East or is it separate (right now it is separate)? Early issues had all news about UN Special Rapporteurs under the UN heading, but as I heard from people that they read only the news items on the countries in which they were interested, I started moving UN and other international news that applies only to one country to the country item. The yearly indexes for the News, which I began keeping in 2013, show how shockingly inconsistent I have been. Yearly indexes for 2016-2018 will be posted to the SAHR website.
After a reader told me that some of the summaries were too brief to allow him to decide whether to read the whole story, I started adding more text to some items, adding work for the translators. Coverage changes; for instance, a few years ago I dropped reporting on any but extraordinary data breaches—there were just too many. I try to avoid using links that lead to sites for paying subscribers only; often I can find an open site that carries the same story and I will cite that.
Over the years I have been asked how I put the issue together. I am always grateful for leads to articles, and I thank the tipsters. But mostly it comes from reading: a dozen daily newspapers in paper or on line and several dozen other electronic news sources, some daily, some weekly, some biweekly, some monthly. I always use and am enormously thankful for Peter Kurilecz’s RAINbyte, Documentary Heritage News from Library and Archives Canada, and the monthly Crisis Watch from the International Crisis Group; without them this News would be poorer.
The News has many unseen helpers. Until her untimely death in 2017 Cristina Bianchi translated it into French. Since that time the major work of French translation has been done by Remi Dubuisson and Myriam Erwin. Before 2015 some of the News was translated into Spanish by Roman Lescano; since that time Paloma Beneito Arias, Valentina Rojas and Blanca Bazaco Palacios share that task. A number of people have served as webmaster, getting the News onto the ICA page, including Teresa Fallon, Kate Blalack and, currently, Roman Lescano. Thanks to all of them for this time-consuming, unrecognized but incredibly devoted work.
Distributing the News has been complicated. I post the News to the ICA listserve, but the ICA is unable to maintain a subscription list for non-members. Consequently, UNESCO, through the good offices of Jens Boel, made an important contribution by distributing the issues through 2017 to a mailing list it maintained. Since then, thanks to Giulia Barrera, the National Association of Italian Archives’ online archival magazine Il Mondo degli Archivi has taken over, reformatting and distributing the News to a mailing list it maintains. Thanks to all these people and groups.
And, above all, my thanks to all readers everywhere. May the next ten years find more examples of archives affecting positively the human rights of each of us, anywhere we live and work and have our being.