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CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

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Three Sources for Human Rights Reports

Amy Burchfield, Access & Faculty Services Librarian amy.burchfield@law.csuohio.edu | April 21, 2008 - 09:44

If you’re researching in the area of human rights, you’ll definitely want to consult human rights reports. These reports, conducted by governmental entities or major non-governmental organizations, document human rights conditions in all countries worldwide. In them, you’ll find country-specific information on topics such as torture, extrajudicial killing, disappearances, unlawful detention, prison conditions, freedom of speech, human trafficking, rights of women and children, freedom of religion, child soldiers, and more. Some reports broadly describe conditions in a country, while others discuss particular instances of human rights violations with some detail, complete with names and places of incidents.

Three major sources for human rights reports are the U.S. Department of State, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. All three base their reports generally on the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The State Department submits its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices annually to Congress in compliance with sections 116(d) and 502B(b) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (FAA). Its 2007 report was released in March. Archived reports are available online back to 1999.

Unlike the State Department, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch include the United States in the list of countries reported. Both AI’s 2007 report and Human Rights Watch’s 2008 World Report on the United States discuss Guantánamo, torture and other ill-treatment, military commissions, domestic prisons, death penalty, and other topics.

For a basic background on human rights, check out International Human Rights in a Nutshell.


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