Documenting Economic Human Rights Violations
CESR Training for PPEHRC Steering Committee Meeting, given in Minneapolis, MN from August 5-7, 2002.
Why Document?
Evidence: Documentation provides evidence of human rights violations. Evidence is useful for different purposes. One is to seek a remedy for an individual who has suffered a violation. Another is to demonstrate that a particular policy causes violations.
Public Education: Documentation is one of the most effective ways to educate the public about policies and practices that cause violations.
Political Message: Documentation gives your political message immense credibility and force.
Media: Media coverage that is favorable is more likely when there is good documentation.
How to Document?
Fishing vs. Hunting: There are two general approaches when someone is gathering information for documentation. The best documentation uses both.
The fishing approach is when you ask open-ended questions (so tell me what happened? or what are the different reasons you think you lost your housing?). When fishing you just throw out the widest net and see what comes up. The benefit of this is that you may get information you didn’t expect that might be important.
The hunting approach involves using close-ended or targeted questions (Did you lose your housing as a result of being cut-off of TANF?). The benefit of this approach is that you make sure you get the information you are looking for.
When a person is telling their story, it is usually best to start fishing and then finish up hunting in case there are things that might have been left out. But when you are using questionnaires or other methods that don’t allow for that kind of time and depth, it is good to know exactly what information you are looking for and pick that information as the “target” for hunting.
If you are documenting using only the “hunting” approach, however, you need to get information from large numbers of people for it to have meaning. The reason for this is that, for example, if a person gives you the information that they lost their housing as a result of being cut-off TANF, and you don’t ask other questions, you can’t know whether that was the ONLY reason or if it was one of many reasons. You don’t know if they would have lost their housing anyway because the rent went up or something else. You can only know that by fishing. But if 1000 people tell you they lost their housing as a result of getting cut-off TANF, then it is highly unlikely that they would have ALL lost their housing anyway, so it demonstrates that TANF is causing homelessness.
When to Fish and When to Hunt?
How you choose to document depends on your purpose for the documentation. There are at least three purposes.
Judicial/Legal: This is when you want to gather evidence for a court case. In this case fishing is definitely important. Since this kind of forum focuses on an individual violation and you want to know everything about that individual. It is also important to have “hunting” type of information (like statistics) to support the individual case, but the individual violation is the most important.
Policy/Legislative/Commissions: This is when you are using documentation to challenge a policy based on widespread violations. Therefore statistical information (hunting) is important. If you want to condemn a policy as violative of human rights, you want to be able to show it affects a significant number of people in a specific way. But you can’t leave out the personal stories (case studies, or fishing) altogether because that is what moves people on the human level. But in this case, the personal stories are supporting the broader information, unlike in a judicial/legal setting where it is the other way around.
Political Messaging: As stated above, documentation is critical for creating political messages. Personal stories are usually more powerful, but in order to create the most solid message a mix of personal stories and broader numbers is best. What is important for messaging is CONSITENCY and SIMPLICITY. The right wing really has it down, they send out the same simple messages over and over again. So when documenting, it is good to put all the information you gather within the framework of one or two simple themes.
Documenting Under Human Rights Standards
If you are documenting under human rights standards it is important to bring out at least two types of information – causation and lack of remedy.
It is not enough to show that someone is suffering from hunger – you have to show that a government policy caused that person to suffer from hunger. So whether it is because they got cut-off food stamps or some other reason, the connection to the government is really important.
It is also important to show that the person has no remedy. So it is important to show that they can’t access food through any legal means, if you are documenting violations of the right to food. Or that they can’t get housing through any legal means (for example, all the housing programs are full, the rents are too high, and available jobs don’t pay a wage that allows for renting or buying) if you are documenting violations of the right to housing.
Credibility
The most important thing about documentation is CREDIBILITY. However you do your documentation make sure that it is airtight and credible. Even one small credibility problem will taint all the hard work.
