24th meeting


Date:
20-21 April 2001
Location:
Saint Petersburg, Russia


The 24th meeting of the ECCHRD was organised by the Harold and Selma Light Center for Human Rights Advocacy (Light-Center), St. Petersburg in collaboration with Citizen’s Watch, St. Petersburg, and with theInternational Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) in Copenhagen acting as Secretariat for the meeting.

This was the first ECCHRD meeting in the region of the Former Soviet Union, and the first meeting with general participation of representatives from the Newly Independent States and Russia, in particular the Northwestern part of Russia.

The meeting was preceded, on 18 and 19 April, by an Introductory Session for Russian-speaking participants on human rights documentation, by Bert Verstappen, HURIDOCS Secretariat, and a Training Session on the HURIDOCS Bibliographic Standard Formats and the WinISIS software by Ion Iacos and Sven-Erik Baun, IRCT Copenhagen.

The meeting included presentation of the Refworld 2000 CD-ROM and on the theme Electronic publication in the human rights field : access, storage, distribution and copyright problems : exchange of experiences. There was also an interesting discussion on Human rights documentation in Russia : issues and challenges. There were also introductions on the new database of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and on developments in HURIDOCS, and a demonstration on the use of the eXtensible Markup Language XML in the human rights area.

Various thematic networks met and reported back to the Plenary session. They talked about the Psychotrauma Documentation Network, documentation on torture, relations between NGOs and IGOs, and information technology.

report-24-2001-stpetersburg