To finance the project, Witness raised $2 million from individual and foundation sources, including Cinereach and Omidyar Network. As on YouTube or Facebook, users will have their own profile pages with news related to their efforts. “That’s the dream for the Hub.” The site also lets users comment on the content and eventually will host discussion groups, online petitions, and interactive maps. “Once everyone has a camera inside a mobile phone, the issue is about creating a place where people can upload footage safely and make connections with people who might further their cause and their campaigns,” Gabriel says. As handset makers began building both still and video cameras into their phones, ordinary people suddenly had the means - and power - to document their lives. In recent years, however, technology has provided an answer: cell phones. Not to mention it’s simply impossible to get cameras in everyone’s hands. “Some cameras don’t make it where they’re supposed to go, or people don’t know what way the film goes in,” Gabriel explains. Afterward, Kadyrov funded the rebuilding of homes, a school, a medical center, and other infrastructure.ĭespite Witness’s achievements, though, the logistical challenge of getting citizens equipped and trained has been a major limitation. Just last year, “Crying Sun,” a Witness video on the impact of war on the community of the North Caucasus mountains, was presented to Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, whose private militia had been widely criticized by human-rights organizations. There have been plenty of success stories as a result, from the arrest of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for war crimes in the Congo to raising money for land-mine victims in Senegal. The group has amassed one of the largest existing collections of human-rights-abuse footage and has shown its videos to policy makers and human-rights groups around the world. “But it seemed like whenever there was video evidence, it was very hard to deny and bury and forget.”įor the past 16 years, Witness has provided video cameras to carefully selected activists and community leaders in more than 100 countries. “What I found extraordinary was that people could suffer in this way and have their stories completely buried,” he says. The Hub is an offshoot of Witness, the Brooklyn-based human-rights nonprofit that Gabriel started in 1992 after learning the extent of abuses worldwide while headlining a concert tour sponsored by Amnesty International. And it shows how the dynamics of social networking can be applied in powerful new ways. “It’s a YouTube for human rights,” Gabriel says. Now in beta, the Hub allows anyone around the world to submit clips to a central site where its target audience of activists can connect and take action. Filling that void is the Hub ( ), a video-sharing Web site launched by ex-rock star Peter Gabriel to empower people to document and publicize unseen atrocities. Eventually the story got picked up by other bloggers and the mainstream media, and sparked international outrage that led to the prosecution of the offending officers and the reactivation of Abbas and el-Hamalawy’s YouTube account.īut with thousands of undocumented abuses playing out around the world every day, the episode highlighted the potential for an online-video network devoted to human rights. YouTube has strict guidelines against graphic sexual or violent material, and suspended the bloggers’ account.
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