Witness (human rights group)

WITNESS is a human rights non-profit organization based out of Brooklyn, New York. Its mission is to partner with on-the-ground organizations to support the documentation of human rights violations and their consequences, in order to further public engagement, policy change, and justice.Witness has partnered with more than 300 human rights groups in over 80 countries.

Mission statement

WITNESS is an international organization that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights. Every day, activists and citizens risk their lives to expose the truth. We help make sure their efforts aren’t in vain. WITNESS is a leader of a global movement that uses video to create human rights change.

History

Witness was founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel, along with the help of Human Rights First (then known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and its founding executive director Michael Posner.

Musician and activist Peter Gabriel was influenced by his experience using a Sony Handycam, one of the first small camcorders marketed to consumers, to record the stories he heard while traveling with Amnesty International’s 1988 Human Rights Now! Tour. He decided to found Witness after the 1991 police brutality incident involving Rodney King, Jr., in which a bystander's video of King's beating by the Los Angeles police was critical both in raising awareness and in generating widespread public attention. To Gabriel, this video demonstrated the power of video to capture the world’s attention and viscerally communicate human rights abuses.

Human rights group

A human rights group, or human rights organization, is a non-governmental organization which advocates for human rights through identification of their violation, collecting incident data, its analysis and publication, promotion of public awareness while conducting institutional advocacy, and lobbying to halt these violations.

Like other NGOs, human rights groups are defined in their characteristics by legal, including taxation, constraints under which they operate, such as

What distinguishes a human rights group from other political elements of any given society is that while political advocates usually seeking to protect only the rights of their own constituents, a human rights group seeks to defend the same rights for all members of that or any other society.

Unlike political groups which seek to advance their own discrete interests or programs a human rights group attempts to keep the political process open to all legitimate participants in the societal conflicts where such human rights violations occur. This generally independent focus distinguishes human rights groups from sectarian and partisan groups such as for example trades unions, whose primary goal is to protect the interests of the members of unions.

Human rights

Human rights are moral principles or norms, that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being," and which are "inherent in all human beings" regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances; for example, human rights may include freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Human

Modern humans (Homo sapiens, primarily ssp. Homo sapiens sapiens) are the only extant members of Hominina clade (or human clade), a branch of the taxonomical tribe Hominini belonging to the family of great apes. They are characterized by erect posture and bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity and increased tool use, and a general trend toward larger, more complex brains and societies.

Early hominins—particularly the australopithecines, whose brains and anatomy are in many ways more similar to ancestral non-human apes—are less often referred to as "human" than hominins of the genus Homo. Some of the latter used fire, occupied much of Eurasia, and gave rise to anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They began to exhibit evidence of behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago, and migrated in successive waves to occupy all but the smallest, driest, and coldest lands.

The spread of humans and their large and increasing population has had a profound impact on large areas of the environment and millions of native species worldwide. Advantages that explain this evolutionary success include a relatively larger brain with a particularly well-developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which enable high levels of abstract reasoning, language, problem solving, sociality, and culture through social learning. Humans use tools to a much higher degree than any other animal, are the only extant species known to build fires and cook their food, and are the only extant species to clothe themselves and create and use numerous other technologies and arts.

Group

Group may refer to:

Groups of people

In science and technology

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In computing and the internet

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