- Coronavirus and human rights: Preparing WITNESS’s response UPDATE: Our COVID-19 landing page is here (and Portuguese, Spanish) COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is creating rapid and dangerous human rights implications globally, directly impacting people’s lives, livelihoods, security, health, ability to work and freedom of movement and assembly, as well as leading to implications for digital rights and increasing online surveillance. The immediate implications of coronavirus – […]
- This Week on the Human Rights Channel: Syria, Mexico, Honduras Images and first person accounts from Syrian refugees, a Mexican student who survived a deadly police attack, and Honduran villagers evicted from their homes.
- Community Reporters Document Deadly Raid on Indigenous Villages in Guatemala Reports by imperiled community journalists in Guatemala paint a picture of horror when police forces descend upon communities battling a hydroelectric dam.
- Forced Evictions, Live Ammunition, and Video Documentation in Cape Town Videos have helped document the violence and abuse that has characterized a recent series of forced evictions in Cape Town. The raids on informal residential communities are raising serious questions about police conduct and the government’s protection of constitutional rights to housing.
- Human Rights Video Weekly: Food aid reaches Syria, Forced evictions in Myanmar As Syrian peace talks gets underway this week, footage from Syrian media activists and aid organizations assisting the evacuation of residents from Homs and the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus document the challenges and progress of efforts to reach communities under siege.
- WITNESS and Amnesty International Release a New Toolkit for Housing & Land Rights Activists With 15 million people at risk of forced evictions annually around the world, we have released a multimedia resource kit for activists, social movements and communities fighting evictions.
- Key for a Key: Unlocking a Video Advocacy Training in Brazil What's it like to be in a WITNESS video training? This post brings you inside the classroom in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where two dozen activists are working to save their communities from forced evictions.
- Dear Mandela: Putting a Documentary to Work Impact does not happen in a straight line: you make the film, show it, and things change. We spent four years shooting Dear Mandela, but it wasn't until we finished that we fully understood where our audience would be.
- Watching, Documenting, or Participating: A Documentarian’s Ethical Dilemmas When is it okay to watch? When is it okay to shout with the crowd? Filmmaker Chris Kelly explains his bright line between observing and participating. Do you agree? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
- Video Advocacy at a Crossroads: 2012’s Dangers & 2013’s Solutions Video is increasingly at the nexus of opportunity and danger for human rights activists. Video helps activists to document, confront, circumvent, and lobby against oppressive authorities—but it also allows those authorities to stalk them. Here's what we think will happen in 2013.
- A Big Year For WITNESS A changing world needs a changed vision: committing to support the millions who can transform the human rights landscape with video.
- Mexico: Peoples’ Tribunal Confirms “Gross Violations” in Dam Projects Communities harmed by dam projects in Mexico won an important victory. A panel of international experts serving as judges for the Mexico chapter of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (PPT) recognized a pattern of "gross and systematic human rights violations" in the construction of dams throughout Mexico over the past 40 years. More than 185,000 people have been forcibly evicted.
- Dam-Affected Communities in Mexico Take Government to Peoples’ Tribunal On November 5-6, many of our local partners fighting forced evictions in Mexico will travel to the small town of Temacapulín, in Jalisco state, to tell their stories to an international panel of judges representing the Mexico chapter of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (PPT).
- VIDEO: Meet Elisângela, the Other Face of Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Legacy Elisângela wasn't home when they arrived. Her 17-year-old daughter called her cellphone, frantic, to break the news: "There are several men from the municipal government here at our door; they're saying they're going to demolish our house." Elisângela raced home to try to negotiate, to no avail. In a few hours, the home she and her family had spent years building was now a pile of rubble.
- NYTimes Reports on Forced Evictions in Rio, But Serious Questions Remain In December, we brought you a Video the Government of Rio de Janeiro Didn't Want You To See and showed you how our partner activists in Rio were confronting Olympics organizers on the forced evictions of poor communities in Rio ahead of the 2016 Olympics.
