The Human Rights Web has moved to a new location on its own server, and may now be reached at http://www.hrweb.org.
The Human Rights Primer page has been finished and posted. A number of new links have been put on the Human Rights Resources page, which will probably undergo a serious expansion in the next few weeks as well. The Home Pages list off of the Amnesty International Page has several new Local Group pages and a new National Group page.
A major revision of the site has been posted. Changes include:
A new job and several other new parts of my life are taking up considerable time, leading to a ridiculous backlog in updates and expansion of the pages. I'm in the process of cutting out what I know I can't do and setting the pages up to require less time. I also hope to form an ongoing "special projects" team to help with creating new sections to the site and maintaining high-maintenance sections. Thank you for your patience. :)
This site officially opened on July 18, 1994 in my public ftp directory on the ftp server at Netcom Online Communications Services in San Jose, California, USA. On October 22 it moved to the WWW server at Traveller Information Services in Huntsville, Alabama, where it remained until January 25, 1997. It then moved to its own domain, hrweb.org.
If you want to link to any part of this site (such as to one of the UN Agreements), feel free to do so. I do request that, if your site is outside of North America and you want to link to UN or other documents only, you mirror them on your site instead of linking. This is to reduce load on limited transoceanic Internet links. If you notify me that you are linking to my site or mirroring any of the documents here, I will put your name on a list to be notified any time anything that might affect your links or mirrors will happen.
If you administer another human rights site, please let me know about it. I would like to link to it on the home page so that users of this site can benefit from yours, as well.
While I am a member of Amnesty International and long-time supporter of a number of human rights groups, this Human Rights site is my individual work and my sole responsibility. Except where I indicate clearly that something comes from another source, I wrote what is here and am responsible for any mistakes. If you spot a mistake, please notify me so that I can fix it.
As you have probably noticed, the site is under development and a lot of pages remain to be written. I welcome all kinds of help, such as volunteering to write up a page or put together a list of resources. While I'll send pure flames straight to dev/null, please feel free to express any concerns you have about the site, the information, or how it is being presented. Human Rights is a tough subject, and I make mistakes and have prejudices like the rest of the human race.
A particular concern (for everyone in the human rights community) is inaccurate information. I also believe strongly in the right of anyone, individual or government, to reply to an accusation. Unfortunately much of the news and almost all of the calls for action originating from the human rights movement includes at least an implied accusation against individuals or a government. I am doing what I can to minimize inaccurate information by getting my material from the most reputable groups. Where an emergency appears to exist, though, even these groups will sometimes issue an alert or call for action before they've confirmed all the facts, because a delay to confirm facts may mean more people die or are hurt.
If you see anything that appears incorrect, please feel free to contact me and express your concerns. If an individual or government directly mentioned in an alert or news article wishes to reply in writing to the article or accusations, I will post their reply unaltered on this site at the location where the original item was posted. If a third party is convinced that inaccurate information has been posted, while I won't promise to post his/her comments, I will consider it seriously. Please don't be afraid to ask.
Something I would love to hear about, and which (regrettably) doesn't appear often enough in normal human rights channels, is what a government or country is doing to help promote human rights. An example might be a government which is prosecuting an official who tortured or mistreated a prisoner, a government which establishes training for its law enforcement and military people on how to avoid abusing human rights while doing their jobs, a government which sets up a program to help people whose rights have been abused, etc. Any information you can send me on this subject will appear in the News page, unless you request otherwise.
Created on July 17, 1994 / Last edited on January 25, 1997.