Human Rights Investigations Lab

As of February 2021, the Human Rights Investigations Lab has its own website. Please go there for the latest information.

__________________________________________________

Launched in Fall 2019, the Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas is dedicated to offering digital verification support to non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners that are conducting open source investigations. Housed in the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas (Huerta Center) at UC Santa Cruz, this lab harnesses digital technologies to address and confront human rights violations. The Lab’s social justice mission is to track and monitor ongoing humanitarian, environmental and socio-political crises throughout the Americas by using open source investigative methods to promote justice and achieve accountability for communities adversely affected by human rights violations. This lab continues the Huerta Center’s rich history of supporting interdisciplinary social justice research by faculty and students since 1992. For more information, please email hrlab@ucsc.edu.

The Human Rights Investigations Lab has received UC Santa Cruz funding from the Institute for Social Transformation, Social Sciences Division, Graduate Division, Arts Division, Film and Digital Media, The Humanities Institute, and Radical Resilence, and has had its work supported by Hunchly, Bellingcat, and Facebook Research.

Student researchers reflect a wide range of fields and disciplines including, but not limited to, Latin American and Latino Studies, Environmental Studies, Film and Digital Media, Politics, Philosophy, Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Legal Studies.

________________________________________________________________________________________
We would like to acknowledge the many people who have helped support the launch of the lab from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and would like to thank the following supporters: 

Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley: 
Alexa Koenig, Andrea Lampros, Félim McMahon, Shakiba Mashayekhi, Leenah Bassouni, and Stephanie Croft.

UC Santa Cruz:
Kristy Golubiewski-Davis, Daniel Story, and the staff of the Digital Scholarship Commons, Irena Polic, Saskia Dunkell, Ruby Rich, Jennifer Taylor, Stephanie Moore, Gabriela Arredondo, Christina Navarro, Ursula Oberg, Jeffrey Erbig, and Fernando Leiva.

________________________________________________________________________________________

From the 2019-2020 Annual Report about the lab's first year: