CONTACT: Terry Coonan(850) 644-3410
By Jeffery SeayOctober 2001
FSU CONFERENCE WILL ADDRESS IMPORTANCE OF DOCUMENTING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.-From torture and forced disappearances to genocide, how would the world prosecute the guilty without any evidence of wrongdoing? A three-day conference that will explore the ways human rights violations have been documented and archived worldwide to both prosecute the violators and create a public memory of the violations will convene at Florida State University Nov. 1.
Scholars, archivists and grassroots human rights activists from around the world are scheduled to attend "Archives in the Service of International Human Rights." The free conference is the first-of-its-kind in the United States and is the inaugural conference of the FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. It will take place at the Turnbull Center, 555 W. Pensacola St., and is open to the public.
Human rights activist Joyce Horman, whose husband was murdered by Chilean security forces in 1973, will open the conference with the lecture "Why Human Rights Archives Matter," Nov. 1 at 9 a.m. Horman, who was the subject of the Costa Gavras film "Missing," will address how human rights archives are essential to her own quest for justice regarding her husband's disappearance and death.
"This conference will bring together an incredible array of people from around the world who are on the front lines in the effort to document human rights violations and bring violators to justice," said Terry Coonan, director of the center. "The center's mission is not only to educate and train students in human rights advocacy, but also to examine and inform public policy with conferences such as this one."
Coonan said that FSU's interdisciplinary approach to human rights and its leadership in information technology make it a natural place to explore how university communities can lead the way to better preserve and disseminate human rights archives, whether they are documents, video or film.
Such human rights archives have been crucial to ongoing investigations and judicial proceedings conducted by the governments of South Africa, Argentina and Cambodia, and by United Nations criminal tribunals.
Among the human rights advocates who will discuss the archives that have been created and compiled by their organizations:
* Gennedy Kuzovkin and Alena Kozlova of Memorial, a Russian non-governmental organization founded to preserve the memory of human rights victims in the former Soviet Union, Nov. 2, 9:50 a.m.;
* Craig Etcheson, who will present key evidence to the Cambodian government as it begins to prosecute those who committed genocide there. Etcheson's talk is "Preserving Memories of Mass Atrocities: Documenting the Cambodian Genocide," Nov. 2, 3 p.m.;
* Anne Harringer, a filmmaker and the executive director of the International Monitor Institute, which compiles video footage of human rights abuses for use as evidence in courtrooms and war crime tribunals, Nov. 2, 3:45 p.m.;
* Diop Kamau, doctoral student in the FSU School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and executive director of the Police Complaints Center, which has used video footage to document police misconduct throughout the United States, Nov. 3 at 9 a.m.
* Jose Vasquez and Alfonso Porres, filmmakers with the Guatemalan Cultural and Audiovisual Center that has been chronicling human rights abuses in Guatemala over the past decade. They will screen human rights video footage on Nov. 3, 10 a.m.
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