Washington — Human rights activists are finding that easy-to-use technologies such as cell phones, small digital cameras and the Internet expand their ability to document and discuss human rights abuses. Now they have a central platform on which to place their material for the world to see.

The Hub, launched in November 2007, bills itself as the world’s first participatory media site for human rights. An interactive community, it allows just about any concerned citizen worldwide to upload videos, audio or photos and share their human rights stories with the world. The goal is to use interactive social media as a catalyst for positive social change.

The Hub is a project of WITNESS, an independent, nonprofit international human rights organization that uses video and online technologies to focus public attention on human rights abuses and find ways to end them.

WITNESS is the brainchild of Peter Gabriel, a British musician and songwriter who rose to fame in the early 1970s as the lead vocalist with the progressive rock band Genesis. Inspired by what he learned of human rights abuses while performing with the 1988 Human Rights Now concert tour sponsored by Amnesty International, Gabriel co-founded WITNESS in 1992 in conjunction with the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

WITNESS partners with 12 to 15 human rights organizations at a time for a period of one year to three years to provide training in using video as a key component of their advocacy work. So far, WITNESS has worked with some 300 organization in more than 70 countries.

A number of the resulting video campaigns have met with considerable success. An example is Crying Sun. The film was produced with the help of WITNESS by Human Rights Center Memorial, an organization based in Moscow. It documents the abuses inflicted on villagers living in Zumsoy, Chechnya, because of the fighting between separatists and the federal government. In 2008, following screenings of Crying Sun to decisionmakers in Chechnya and globally, Human Rights Center Memorial was able to help secure Chechen government funding to rebuild damaged homes and other infrastructure in that village.

LOWERING THE BARRIERS TO HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

One of the missions of The Hub is to lower the barriers to participation in online media for ordinary people, according to Sameer Padania, manager for The Hub. In the past, he told America.gov, human rights news came to the public “filtered” by news organizations and others. “But people couldn’t see and judge for themselves,” he said. The Hub, according to Padania, does not compete with commercial journalism but expands on it.

The videos on The Hub, Padania said, range from very raw footage to very polished pieces of documentary journalism. “But in between,” he said, “there are lots and lots of interviews, and often these are with people whose perspectives have never been heard, that have never been shared. They’ve never been able to express themselves about the abuses they’ve faced or what they want to see happen, or how they want reparations or change.”

The advent of affordable cell phones with the capacity to shoot still photos and video has had a huge impact, Padania said. Not only do cell phones make documentation of human rights abuses easier, dissemination of news gathered via cell phone can reach the public at every strata of society. An example of this is the cell phone footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot and killed in June during anti-government demonstrations in Iran. The video quickly reached audiences around the world via YouTube and Facebook and was seen even by President Obama, who called her death “heartbreaking” and “unjust” at a White House press conference June 23.

That the president of the United States would watch such a video and publicly comment on it demonstrates that such media have earned “an acknowledgement among policy circles that this kind of video has validity,” Padania said.

While The Hub currently contains numerous videos shot by mobile phones, Padania said the site has not yet enabled a direct mobile phone upload feature — but hopes to make that available in the near future. In the meantime, individuals can upload their mobile video, audio and still photos from their computers by creating an account on The Hub’s Web site.

The Hub has about 30,000 participants, either as contributors of material or as recipients of The Hub’s electronic newsletter, Padania said.

Participants can engage with The Hub in English, Spanish and French; Arabic, Chinese and Russian are to be added in the future. More voices need to be heard, Padania said, from countries that don’t have “online power.”

“We really do feel optimistic about the use of technology,” Padania said, “but I think it has to be in the context of understanding that it is still risky work, that human rights activists are risking their lives day in and day out to bring this content out.”

More information about The Hub is available on its Web site.

The Crying Sun video is available on the WITNESS Web site.

A transcript of Obama’s remarks about Neda Agha-Soltan is available on America.gov.