Getting information on human rights has become much easier, especially with the advent of the Internet. A huge "library" of resources, information and databases is now available at the end of the phone.
For an overview of human rights (and how to claim and defend them), an initial point of reference should be The Human Rights Handbook by Kathryn English and Adam Stapleton published in 1995 by the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.
A more recent publication of Britain's Department for International Development which provides an excellent overview is A Human Rights Approach to Development by Julia Hausermann.
Two additional and essential reference works are the yearly human rights reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - the two non-governmental organisations at the forefront of monitoring.
These reports cover individual countries and regions in addition to specific issues from the rights of women and children to prison, freedom of expression and international corporations. For a variety of international perspectives in digestible form, Human Rights: The New Consensus, published in 1994 by Regency Press in association with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is excellent.
For those seeking an overview of human rights education, The Challenge of Human Rights Education, edited by Hugh Starkey and published by the Council of Europe in 1991, is readable and relevant.
Without doubt, the richest source of information is now the Internet. Some of the most useful sites include the following:
http:www.unhchr.ch - Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights which contains updates on specific events and issues.
http:www.unhchr.ch - Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
http:www.umn.edu.humanrts - University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, the major source for human rights documents, including historical ones. It includes an excellent human rights education section as well as onward links to hundreds of other organisations globally in addition to specific issue briefings and updates.
Two excellent non-governmental sites are:
http:www.igc.org - the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) which provides instant access to a variety of networks focusing on human rights, women's issues, peace, labour and conflict - and
http:www.oneworld.org - One World which contains an excellent overview and briefing of human rights issues.
Other useful sites include:
http:www.amnesty.org - Amnesty International;
http:www.hri.ca - Human Rights Internet;
http:www.hrw.org - Human Rights Watch.
For those working on human rights and conflict, the site maintained by the Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity at the University of Ulster is excellent, especially the CAIN section - http:www.incore.ulst.ac.uk - as is the site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Directory of Human Rights Resources on the Internet - http:www.aaas.org/dhr - for general research.
Colm Regan is co-ordinator of 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World, an independent development and human rights education organisation based in Bray, Co Wicklow.