I’m celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the first international forum on Archives and Human Rights, held in the Mexican Senate in Mexico City. The forum has brought together archivists, human rights groups, representatives of truth commissions, policy makers and universities from a number of countries, including South Africa, the Netherlands, Armenia and the Unites States.
Of course, Mexico has pride of place as host. Mexico is an example of how Latin America continues to lead the way in dealing with human rights problems, even as the hemisphere still struggles with serious issues. The elegance of the forum site – a wood-paneled room decorated with Christmas poinsettias — is in stark contrast to the human rights problems that face the country: cases of torture, killings related to security force-drug corruption, the break down of the rule of law and the palpable grind of the economic hardship that sends so many north to the United States.
Human rights archives are a hot topic now. The reason is generational, I think. I see this in my own career, also. When I began writing about human rights issues in the 1980s, I didn’t need a degree. Like many colleagues, I came to the work more by passion than training. It was enough to live somewhere and become an “expert.” What I needed to know about law standards or policy, I learned by doing (and I’ll defend that method to the end of my days!). What I brought to the work was a willingness to throw myself in to research, writing and the kind of nitty-gritty policy work that creates change.
But increasingly, young people who wants to do the things I did have to have law or master’s degree. Undergraduates who come to me for advice find that I urge them not to do what I did. Times have changed. Human rights is now a “field,” a “career path,” a “specialty.” Human rights groups that once existed on shoestring budgets are now raising millions to fund activities world wide.
And no longer does human rights have to depend solely on convincing leaders or countries to reform. Increasingly, governments that contemplate abuses must factor in the possibility of international justice for crimes against humanity. Even former “Masters of the Universe” like Donald Rumsfeld have to wonder if some day, in the words of lawyer Phillipe Sands, they will feel the tap on the shoulder that leads to their imprisonment and trial on human rights crimes.
And with this maturity comes a record – documents, disputes, photographs, memoirs, moments, splits – that must be preserved. Human rights is a pursuit, a career, an ideal – and also an object of study. How rich, for example, must the gacaca records of Rwanda be? Or all of the testimonios collected during Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation process? Or the Stasi archives from the former East Germany (180 kilometers of papers!!!) Or the still largely inaccessible archives in Armenia related to the 1915-1916 genocide?
There are so many questions that scholars are only beginning to address. Of course, there are the personal stories and the political history. But there are also pressing “meta” questions about human rights. How did human rights become a dominant way to view and engage with the world? What is the relationship between the law and the grassroots appropriation of the ideal of human rights? How have some of the new tools, like truth commissions, helped or complicated the search for justice or standards? In key areas, like the use of force to stop crimes against humanity, we seem to be utterly lost, without real and effective options.
The creation of human rights archives is one way to begin to grapple with these issues – to know where we are going we need to better understand where we have been.