Guide to Documenting Human Rights Violations

How to Document Human Rights Violations

Sample Human Rights Violations

Sample Human Rights Violation Report Form

How to Document Human Rights Violations

This is a great project for poor people organizing in welfare offices, downsized workers and union members, caseworkers and students. Some social work professors are using this documentation as a class project.

We're looking for

• Compelling cases that can be brought to the attention of the UN
• Cases that represent the diversity of issues reflected in UDHR articles 23, 25, and 26
• Cases that represent the diversity of constituencies experiencing economic human rights abuses in this country.

Gathering evidence of human rights violations

• Gather data on incidents such as those listed on the "sample violations" flier.
• Create a flier asking for people's stories, and distribute wherever appropriate.
• We want to focus our documentation on the impact of the recent welfare cuts, but we also want to document the effects of past medical and welfare cuts (GA, pilot projects, etc.), and violations caused by poverty in general.
• Use any source of news or records you have access to. Look up back issues/ records as well as current issues if you can. Possible sources include national and local newspaper articles, TV news reports, legal cases, medical records, official statistics, the internet and special interest or professional list serves.
• Hold meetings with local organizations and agencies you trust who may have access to information we need for this project. Explain to them what we're doing, show them materials and ask how they can help.
• Conduct face to face interviews with people who are being affected by the cuts or who have experienced violations in the past. This is a great way to organize people and involve them in the campaign.
• Take photos, do video recordings, etc. of people you interview, and of places where violations occur.
• Make a sheet to do quick interviews with people as you organize in welfare offices or other locations. Use it to get potentially useful stories or to identify people who may be interested in having a longer interview at some point.
• Fill out the "Human Rights Violation Report Form" whenever you hear of, see or recieve information about a violation. Attach this form to everything you send in (interviews, articles, photos, videos, etc.)
• Use contacts you gain through this project (especially with welfare recipients, poor people, immigrants, etc.) to build your organizing efforts to build this movement.

We'll use what you send us to take this historic case before the United Nations and to present this story to the world.

Who to interview or to ask for evidence on human rights violations:

• People you know who are poor, on welfare, cut-off welfare, or who work in low wage jobs. Ask them for their stories and ask about people they know.
• Social workers, caseworkers, anyone who works in poor communities
• Health centers, welfare offices, 3-2 centers, shelters, etc.
• City officials
• Immigrant organizations
• Labor unions
• Lawyers (especially public defenders and legal service attorneys)
• Religious congregations - for experiences of members or people they "serve"
• Women's and children's advocacy organizations
• Schools, community colleges and community centers based in poor communities
• Community organizations and agencies (YWCA, Rotary, etc.)
• Hospitals, doctors and nurses serving poor areas
• Journalists
• Prison employees, firemen, policemen, etc.
• Anyone who has access to "inside" information on fires, homeless deaths, sweatshops, utilities shut-offs, hiring of workfare recipients, prison workers, etc.
• Don't forget your own story!

Comments on doing this research:

• Learn as much as you can as you do your interviewing and research. Adapt your work to the lessons you learn.
• Be creative - there are no wrong answers.
• Make people understand that the story of what is happening to them is worthwhile and must be told. Just in asking asking people for their story, we are helping break their isolation and empower them.

Sample Human Rights Violations

Use the following list as a guide for what types of incidents/ experiences of human rights violations to look for.

Article 23: The right to jobs at a living wage and just conditions of work.

"Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment... Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection... Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions."

Fair wages:

• Minimum wage jobs that deny workers a living wage and health care
• Workfare policies which force recipients to work for their checks at sub-minimum wage

Safe and just working conditions:

• ·Workfare jobs without safety and health protection
• ·Workers having to work without safety protecton
• ·Conditions and wages for sweatshop workers, farmworkers and other exploited workers
• ·Being forced into a job which is a threat to one's physical health, well-being or dignity
• Injuries and deaths resulting from unsafe or unhealthy working conditions

The right to organize:

• Being fired or demoted for trying to form a union
• Policies which pit the employed against the unemployed

Free choice of employment

• Work requirements in the TANF plan that force recipients to take any job offered them
• Prison labor in which prisoners are forced to work and recieve unjust wages

Article 25: Right to wellbeing of a person and their family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and neccesary social services.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special protection."

Homelessness:

• Being evicted for inability to pay rent or arbitrary decision of landlord
• Diseases, family break-up, violence, etc. in homeless shelters
• Injuries, death or suicide resulting from being forced to live on the streets, in cars or in other dangerous circumstances
• Police brutality and imprisonment for being homeless

Housing and Utilities:

• House fires resulting from faulty wiring, crowding, use of keroscene because of gas being shut off, lack of smoke alarms, children left alone, unsafe conditions in the house, etc.
• Injuries, death or homelessness caused by unsafe or structurally unsound housing situations, or fires
• Injury or death resulting from lack of heat or proper ventilation
• Injury, death or homelessness from gas, water or electricity being shut off
• Denial of civil rights to, and unfair treatment of, public housing residents

Health and nutrition:

• Injuries and death related to lack of proper medical care or being cut off of medical care
• Malnutrition or hunger
• Lack of proper clothing or other protection against the weather
• Emotional or physical injury/illness related to lack of decent food, clothing, housing, medical care and other basic neccesities.
• Illnesses and deaths related to living in polluted environment (ie asthma, lead poisoning, proximity to toxic waste or polluted air, etc.)

Emotional stress:

• Women and children being forced to stay with an abuser because of lack of economic options
• Suicide resulting from being cut off public assistance, desperation caused by poverty, or lack of mental health care
• Child abuse resulting from parent stress due to economic circumstances
• Denial of mental health care

Abuses against children:

• Harm done to children from lack of decent, safe childcare
• Mothers having to leave children alone to work or because of inability to pay for childcare
• Childhood accidents caused by lack of childcare, decent play area or supervision at school, or by hazards in house or school caused by landlord or city neglect
• Children having to work to support the family

The right to security in the event of unemployment:

• Welfare policies which deny aid based on immigrant status, family background, paternity, or time on welfare
• Welfare reform which takes away guarentee of assistance in time of unemployment, or which calls for unneccesary, inhumane or humiliating requirements for getting assistance
• Loss of benefits because of DPW mistake, lack of communication, arbitrary decision of a caseworker, or recipient's lack of knowledge of rights
• Being forced to sign an impossible and invasive contract to get benefits

Protection of mothers and children, regardless of birth status.

• Denial of aid because paternity cannot be proven, because of birth status of child or age of parents.
• Welfare cuts which target single mothers and children.
• Women being forced to work in jobs which do not support their families and which endanger their health, safety and wellbeing and that of their children.
• Women and children being forced to identify their abusers to get welfare.
• Women and children having to stay with abuser because they can't get welfare or don't have money to leave.
• Women having to leave their children alone or in unsafe conditions to get a job.

Article 26: Right to education

"Everyone has the right to education..."

• Welfare recipients being forced to leave school, job training, language classes or GED training to go to work, because of lack of child care or because of arbitrary decision of caseworker.
• Children having to leave school to work to support family or to care for siblings.
• Children missing school or being unable to learn because of homelessness or malnutrition or because of other circumstances listed above.
• University costs and financial aid cuts burdening students with great debt or making higher education inaccesible for financial reasons.