Human Rights: A Survey of Archival Sources in the United States and Canada

Abstract

In the post World War II war era, the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany have given rise to a historically unprecedented international human rights movement that now comprises thousands of organizations worldwide. As monitors and investigators of human rights abuses, these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have left a vast and vitally important trail of largely uncollected archival documentation covering many of the seminal international political and human rights events in the later twentieth century. What will become of this evidence, and what the loss or destruction of this evidence would portend are important questions. An obvious imperative exists not only to preserve human rights archival documentation for scholarship, but also for historical accountability and memory. The only beneficiaries of the loss of this evidence are the perpetrators themselves. In this respect, human rights NGOs and others have a substantial obligation in seeing that the human rights record is preserved. In addition to preserving the voices of individual victims and survivors, it is necessary for historical accountability to retain the perpetrators' memories. Because of the past frequent inability or unwillingness of the world community to bring perpetrators to justice, perhaps the only the longterm human rights tribunal will be the historical verdict. NGOs should thus not do for human rights abusers what such perpetrators and authoritarian regimes have not been able to do for themselves by permitting the record of