Once the backbone of human rights work, documentation is now in crisis. Formal investigations, curated archives, and legal evidence are losing ground amid shifting approaches to philanthropy, NGO precarity, and shrinking civic spaces. Even as established documentation methods utilize new technologies, skepticism toward name-and-shame strategies and legal instruments has left documentation struggling for relevance, particularly in crisis-driven contexts that demand rapid responses.
Yet documentation has not disappeared. Instead, it has become more fragmented, decentralized, and contested, raising urgent questions about its role. From Myanmar to the United States, Palestine to the Philippines, mobile phone footage of abuses now floods social and mainstream media, offering fractured yet vital forms of documentation. As traditional structures crumble, new forms are emerging. The question is no longer whether documentation will persist, but how it will evolve, who will control it, and whether it can still serve as a tool for truth and resistance.
The future of documentation cannot be dictated by the shifting priorities of funders, governments, or tech companies alone. Instead, it must be reclaimed as a collective act of stewardship, ensuring that human rights documentation remains not just a tool of legal accountability but a means of pursuing justice in all its forms.
The last nails in the documentation coffin
For decades, human rights organizations relied on philanthropic foundations, government grants, and multilateral institutions to fund documentation efforts. This support sustained field investigations, evidence collection, and legal case-building. However, the funding landscape has shifted dramatically, reshaping the role and viability of documentation.
Over the past 40 years, HURIDOCS has been helping human rights groups across the globe with their documentation and technological needs, and we have witnessed the field shift firsthand. Donors increasingly favor short-term, advocacy-driven projects over sustained documentation. Many organizations have absorbed documentation teams into advocacy departments, prioritizing political action over long-term record-keeping. Simultaneously, tech philanthropy has promoted data-driven interventions, emphasizing the use of AI, real-time digital tools, and scalable solutions. While these innovations may improve efficiency, they risk sidelining oral testimony, ethnographic research, and qualitative archival work—practices that resist the “seductions of quantification.”
Governments hostile to human rights accountability have further restricted foreign funding, imposed legal barriers, and discredited NGOs. As documentation becomes increasingly fragmented and precarious, its future as a tool for justice, advocacy, and memory becomes more and more uncertain.
The radical rebirth of documentation
In response to mounting pressures, new approaches have emerged, shaped by technology, grassroots actors, and crisis-driven needs. While these methods enhance adaptability, they also introduce new challenges.
Digital and mobile technologies have democratized documentation that was once dominated by international actors and legal investigators. Communities themselves now use smartphones, encrypted messaging, and social media to record abuses and circulate them instantly. This surge of digital content has fueled Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), which analyzes satellite imagery, social media, and geolocation data for human rights investigations. OSINT practices continue to expand despite concerns over consent, privacy, and misuse. Emerging technologies like blockchain and AI purportedly offer tamper-proof records and the automation of transcription and analysis, but they also introduce cybersecurity risks, questions of corporate control, and accessibility barriers. Decentralization empowers, yet it complicates verification, making documentation vulnerable to manipulation and disinformation. Even when evidence is gathered, its legal admissibility remains in doubt.
As established accountability mechanisms fail to capture, let alone act on, the full scope of human rights violations, community-driven grassroots documentation has gained prominence, particularly for marginalized groups whose experiences remain underrepresented in formal justice processes. Participatory action research (PAR) offers an alternative, shifting documentation from a purely evidentiary function to a survivor-centered, culturally grounded process. PAR methodologies such as storytelling circles, memory boxes, and body mapping have been used to document sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) while preserving cultural identity. Rooted in feminist approaches and the Global South, these methods prioritize survivor agency, transforming human rights documentation into an act of empowerment rather than a bureaucratic obligation. By integrating participatory techniques into broader justice frameworks, PAR-driven initiatives challenge systemic exclusions while fostering resilience, healing, and collective memory.
At HURIDOCS, in collaboration with Asia-Pacific documentalists, we developed the Rapid Response Documentation (RRD) Principles to guide crisis documentation. Among them, “Documentation as Shared Stewardship” emphasizes collective responsibility in preserving evidence while ensuring affected communities retain agency over their narratives. “Minimum Viable Documentation” acknowledges the urgency of crises, stressing that only the essential details needed for justice and accountability should be captured at particular moments. RRD is not just about improving documentation—it seeks to reshape power dynamics by centering victims’ needs and equipping frontline documenters with the tools to act swiftly and safely. While these principles have guided crisis documentation in Ukraine, Gaza, and Bangladesh, they remain largely conceptual. They must be fully developed into concrete tools and meaningfully supported by key stakeholders to ensure their lasting impact.
The unfinished work of documentation
While new documentation methods offer innovative possibilities, they also introduce significant ethical, legal, and practical challenges. Decentralized, crowd-sourced documentation raises concerns about verification and trust. The proliferation of deepfakes, manipulated videos, and state-sponsored disinformation makes it easier than ever to discredit genuine evidence, undermining the legitimacy of documentation efforts.
The fragility of digital documentation further complicates these challenges. Evidence stored on social media, cloud platforms, and encrypted servers is vulnerable to government censorship, data loss, and hacking. Authoritarian regimes of the digital age have already erased critical documentation by shutting down internet access, thus suppressing evidence of state violence.
AI-driven predictive modeling and real-time monitoring documentation tools, although promising, also pose risks. Automated transcription, translation, and facial recognition technologies can misinterpret context, erase nuance, and reinforce biases, particularly in conflict zones. In the age of deepfakes, synthetic media, and generative AI, we will face difficulties in discerning the truth in an information ecosystem already flooded with content.
As we develop new documentation paradigms, we must also confront the real and immediate risk of losing past documentation. Funding cuts threaten the survival of longstanding initiatives. Organizations that have spent years collecting and preserving critical evidence are shutting down, putting entire archives and datasets at risk. Without swift intervention, we stand to lose not only the documents themselves but also the histories, struggles, and truths they hold.
Reimagining documentation as collective stewardship
While the effectiveness of conventional documentation models continues to be questioned, and new approaches remain ethically fraught, the future of human rights documentation must balance credibility, accessibility, and resilience. A hybrid model that combines the rigor of established methods with the grounding of participatory work, the efficiency of digital tools, and the agility of rapid response offers a way forward.
At the same time, we must also reconsider which documentation infrastructures and practices we choose to sustain as we rethink the funding landscape. This moment calls for a continued shift in power toward local communities, not only in how documentation is created but also in how databases and archives are designed, maintained, and governed. It is essential to avoid reinforcing dependencies on state and corporate infrastructures or relying solely on legalistic and technocratic models of preservation. If documentation is a core practice that sustains the human rights field, then reimagining our databases and archives—how they are built, who controls them, and what purposes they serve—must become a shared responsibility.
Human rights documentation is dead. Long live human rights documentation!