RightsCon Toronto 2018

Promoting Women's Human Rights in Morocco and Tunisia through Participatory On-Line Court Decision Observatories (MRA Mobilising for Rights Associates)

Speakers: Saida Kouzzi & Stephanie Willman Bordat

In this session, we will share our www.marsadnissa.ma and www.marsadnissa.tn on-line Observatories of domestic court decisions in women's rights cases, intended to be dynamic, participatory, practical tools for research, monitoring and advocacy on women’s rights. The trilingual (Arabic, French, and English) databases are designed to contain a host of diverse judicial decisions from local courts across Morocco and Tunisia.

In Morocco and Tunisia, there are currently no systems for collecting and publishing court decisions such as in Court Reporters, Recueils de jurisprudence, or online tools such as Westlaw or LexisNexis. There are no publicly accessible sources that gather and publish cases from the First Instance and other lower courts, where the majority of cases concerning women’s rights are decided.

The two Observatories hope to promote (a) innovative and rights-based changes to court decisions, (b) improved local NGO, lawyer, and public actor knowledge, skills and systems for comprehensive monitoring, documentation, analysis and advocacy on women’s human rights, and (c) increased accountability, transparency and responsiveness of the justice system in women's rights cases.

We will make an interactive presentation to walk participants through the website platform, highlighting in particular the multicriteria search engine that allows activists to monitor strategic variables in court decisions and the participatory process by which the database is built-up through an organic process designed to create a community of practice.

Amnesty Decoders: on small tasks, big data and massive engagement (Amnesty International)

Speakers: Milena Marin

Amnesty Decoders is a global platform inspiring digital volunteers to contribute to ground breaking human rights research. Join this talk to learn how Amnesty International engaged tens of thousands of digital volunteers to sift through satellite images, documents, pictures and social media streams.

Building a Better Opposition With Pursuance: Large-Scale, Secure Collaboration for Activists, Journalists, and Non-Profits (PursuanceBeyond)

Speakers: Steve Phillips

This session will showcase Pursuance, an open-source, encrypted software platform that provides an effective means for anyone -- activists, journalists, nonprofits, and citizens -- from around the world to organize into a network of robust, agile entities called "pursuances." The purpose of this platform is to make large-scale collaboration radically more effective. Award-winning journalist, activist, and Pursuance founder Barrett Brown has envisioned this platform as a means of amplifying the organic self-organizing dynamics that characterize online activist communities and initiatives like Anonymous and Project PM. By providing functionality that is attuned to these digital dynamics, Pursuance thereby empowers civic and political activism outside of traditional organizational models. Ultimately we aim to foster an energetic global network of forward-thinking individuals capable of addressing large-scale social and political issues.