Former student researcher Sarah Kwan, graduating class of 2017, sits down with UWCHR’s Andrea Marcos to reflect on her time at the center and how she carries that work forward. This interview is featured in the 2024-2025 Annual Report.
AM: Sarah, thanks so much for talking with us. You worked as a student researcher with the Center for Human Rights around 2017. What did you do during your time at CHR?
SK: I mostly worked on the Unfinished Sentences project, submitting Freedom of Information Act requests in search of documentation of human rights violations committed during El Salvador’s armed conflict. During my time there I submitted about 55 FOIA requests. I also helped with preparing for litigation against the Department of Defense, for the case that I worked on regarding the killing of the four Dutch journalists in El Salvador. It was a case about free speech suppression, violence against journalists, and crimes against humanity.
I spent a lot of time combing through declassified documents, trying to piece together useful evidence for a case, then identifying what information was still missing and submitting more records requests to try to get that information. It takes a lot of time to declassify records, so you end up passing on that work to the next cohort of student researchers, creating a lineage of human rights research.
The research we did while I was there helped a number of organizations and outlets. We worked with the Dutch war crimes police and helped documentary filmmakers as well. Using the documents that we compiled, they were able to find one of the military commanders they were looking for in the case who was responsible for war crimes. We were coming off of a lawsuit against the CIA in 2015 and it was very interesting being able to be there for that, seeing the fight for access to information happen through litigation, how that informed our strategy. And since then, the center has sued a few more times.
It takes a lot of time to declassify records, so you end up passing on that work to the next cohort of student researchers, creating a lineage of human rights research.
AM: Can you give us your reaction to the historic court ruling this year in El Salvador, which found, for the first time, high-ranking military officials legally accountable for the killing of civilians during the civil war—in this particular case, for the killing of four Dutch journalists? You worked on that case during your time at CHR. How did it feel to hear about that news?
SK: It was shocking because I had been really loosely following things that were happening in El Salvador—current events, but also the cases that we worked on—and as far as I knew, they were shut down with the current Salvadoran administration. I wasn’t hopeful anything would come of it. With human rights research work, sometimes you feel a lot of despair, thinking this doesn’t mean anything, it happened so long ago, no one cares. It’s really hard to move the needle and it can be hard to get momentum behind research on human rights violations that happened decades ago. So it kind of took me by surprise to hear there was a positive outcome from it. But it also brought up a lot of questions for me: Why the Dutch journalist case, but not El Mozote or a bunch of other cases we worked on? Why doesn’t a massacre of a thousand Salvandoran peasants get the same justice as the assasination of four Dutch journalists?
This court ruling felt like the work that we did eight years ago is still meaningful. It reaffirmed this spirit I have, that can sometimes be easy to lose touch with, reminding me that we’re in it for the long haul.
But I think this case reaffirmed something for me—oftentimes we struggle with feeling very defeatist or pessimistic about human rights work, which can take so long to have an impact. This court ruling felt like the work that we did eight years ago is still meaningful. It reaffirmed this spirit I have, that can sometimes be easy to lose touch with, reminding me that we’re in it for the long haul, and we might not see results now, but you never know if it’ll be successful or worthwhile later. I remember at the time, when I was working at the center, Angelina would say even if these cases aren’t successful, the fact that we’re pursuing it, the fact that it’s in the historical and collective memory, and that we’re giving survivors a platform to talk about what happened, that we’re showing the world, and survivors, that we care, and we’re going to carry on and see it through, even if no one else cares—that’s important.
I see it in the work I do now. For example, after I graduated, I worked at a women’s shelter as a case manager, and there’s so many cases with high turnover. It was really important to me to make sure each person and their story were cared for. And I feel like I learned that a lot of that from the center—I learned that even when we run up against institutional barriers and capacity issues, it is so important that people feel like we’re all in a community and I’m not just going to drop this because this is inconvenient to me, or I can’t do anything about it.
We will never get to know the extent of the horrors that happened, nor will we know the extent of the organizing and resistance against them. It just really hammers in this point of why access to information is a human right.
The Dutch journalist case is also important to me because for the past two years of the barbarous genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people, we’ve seen journalists assassinated at an astronomical rate, far more than any conflict in recorded history. There’s just so many parallels with this case, with Salvadoran journalists killed because the government didn’t want anyone to report on the atrocities that are happening there. And there is, there was, no justice for that. Not only is it a crime against a free press, but also it leaves us with a world where we have little evidence or stories about what happened on the ground because people trying to tell those stories were assassinated by the state. So I just think about that—I think about how little we really know about the atrocities happening in Gaza and Palestine in general, how little we know about the atrocities that happened in El Salvador back then and now. Lately, I’ve been reading about chattel slavery in the U.S., and how, in this case as well, we really don’t know that much about these atrocities, but also, how people escaped, organized against it, resisted, and liberated themselves. We know about the Underground Railroad, sure, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. These connections keep coming up whenever I read about the Dutch journalist case and about the Palestinian people’s resistance to occupation and genocide—and how we are prevented from knowing our history to effectively fight for a better, liberated future for all people.
It’s important that people feel like there are others that care about your rights and they’re willing to spend time that they are not obligated to spend to bear witness to the mistreatment you experience. That’s something we did at the center.
Something that’s so integral to the work of the Unfinished Sentences project is the attempt to shed light on events that happened—these unfinished processes where survivors don’t have any closure because there is such limited information, and what little there is is being gatekept by the U.S. and the Salvadoran government. The fact that we don’t have a clear avenue towards closure is, on a personal level, heartbreaking. We will never get to know the extent of the horrors that happened, nor will we know the extent of the organizing and resistance against them. It just really hammers in this point of why access to information is a human right, the importance of free press, the importance of places like the UW Center for Human Rights, and the importance of all the different avenues that people use to share information and stories.
AM: Can you tell us a bit more about what you learned from your time working at the center, about the parallels in your current work?
SK: I think one of the other biggest takeaways I had from my time at the center was the level of internationalism and international solidarity that we had. We would send students to go with Angelina to El Salvador, and that connection is incredibly valuable. The center would send partner organizations, like El Rescate, up to Seattle to meet with all of us. There was this emphasis on in-person building that people can take for granted, and that I really emphasize in the work I do now. We need to meet people and make international connections, learn from people and build networks—and not only personal relationships but also organizational relationships—to really strengthen the work that we do. During my time at the center, it was always explained why we needed to do that: how not only do these connections and relationships inform the work that the center does, but they inform the direction of the center, and they ensure that, by having more of a dialogue between organizations and people, the work that we’re doing is actually useful. Sometimes I felt like in academia, it’s not a relationship, not a conversation at all, and it was very transactional. However, that wasn’t the way that Angelina showed us how the center would do it—I really saw there that you had to take relationships with care and build them long term. It showed that the center really did care about the work that it was doing, that it actually mattered and was making a material impact.
I see this reflected in my anti-imperialist organizing in the past few years; my experience working at the center serves as a touchstone for how to conduct meetings internationally, how to do that effectively, how to be mindful of my position, and how to have conversations so that the work that we’re doing together is actually meaningful.
I think that there’s also something with the way that people at the center teach their principles that was huge for me—they’re incredibly principled people, I don’t know how else to put it. But I think that translates into some of the other work I do now, like, for example, it makes me think of my experience with the National Lawyers Guild. Part of the thinking behind legal observing is that you want to be there to bear witness to what people experienced, in this case how police mistreat people who are participating in their right to protest and to free speech. Even if protesters don’t pursue litigation against the police, it’s important that people feel like there are others that care about your rights and they’re willing to spend time that they are not obligated to spend to bear witness to the mistreatment you experience. That’s something we did at the center, and I feel like that translates to so much of the work I do now that is difficult to quantify, but it’s a quality thing and your community would rather have you doing this work than not.
The center was very matriarchal which I felt impacted the level of care that was brought to the work and to each other. Having Angelina, Phil, and Emily be people that are very mindful and caring, not just about the work, but also about each other in the center—it was inspiring. I experienced a kind of whiplash after college, working at a women’s shelter, then a human trafficking prevention nonprofit, and now a public library. You would think that people, and organizations, have these principles and they would live up to them, but they don’t always, and it can be a shock.
Another thing I learned during my time at the center, I learned how to be useful to our movement and community by honing an attention to detail, and I learned how to communicate about those details. The research we were doing was so important, and we had to not make it too academic because the goal was not to keep it in academia, but to have everyone use it.
AM: Can you say more about how your work at CHR changed how you feel about research, access to information, documents, databases, if it has?
SK: I appreciate that the center tries to popularize access to information, that’s really important. Part of the reason why I work at a public library is because I don’t want to be siloed into an academic sphere, I want to be able to work with everyone. Much of what I do at the library, in addition to my job, is union organizing. I’m always trying to think about how to communicate things effectively to my coworkers and make information useful, helping people understand our very complicated contracts; how our union and city government work; how decisions get made. Sometimes people even want to file a public records request and I can actually walk them through it. And I think that’s what the center really trained me for—being able to be extremely detail oriented, analytical, and to understand really niche government documents and how processes work. Because it’s one thing to understand it, but then it’s another to figure out how to communicate that to people who don’t have that same knowledge background. That’s really helpful in the work that I do now: demystifying processes for people so that they can feel empowered to take action. I want people to feel like these systems are not some scary, complicated bureaucracy but rather people understand what strategies we need to take in order to win our next contract or change something at the workplace that’s dangerous or unfair.
It showed that the center really did care about the work that it was doing, that it actually mattered and was making a material impact.
AM: What’s it like to have been part of a CHR model of generations of students working on these long-term projects?
SK: How collective everything is at the center is so important! I was so grateful to have this orientation and training at such a young age, because it sped up a lot of the development I had as an organizer. I really feel like working at the Center for Human Rights hammered in this mentality of contributing to a collective. There wasn’t much individualism there and very little ego, everyone just pitched in and gave it their all because they were passionate and they actually cared about making an impact and fighting for justice. And that can be rare to find sometimes, even in movement work. I feel like the generational model helps with that: it’s like your time is limited, you’re doing the best you can in the short amount of time that you have, and you’re just trying to contribute a piece to the puzzle that we’re all working towards. This constant movement also keeps the work from getting stale, as fresh eyes bring forward new perspectives and strategies, while a continuity of leadership and vision is maintained.
I want people to feel like these systems are not some scary, complicated bureaucracy but rather people understand what strategies we need to take in order to win our next contract or change something at the workplace that’s dangerous or unfair.
What I took away from my time at the center was the importance of a long-term vision; of how the work you do is like picking up a baton and passing it on. I learned to hold that work with so much care because you have to have this understanding that you are part of a lineage. I think about this too, in the organizing work I do now: How can I make this better for the generation after me, even if I don’t stay in a particular role?
I really like that I have a long-term relationship with the center. It’s been eight years since I left! So being able to hear little updates, even if things are slow going, even if the news is “Well, we’re still working on it,” it’s good to know things are still moving along, and it helps to feel like what you did mattered, what you did contributed to this larger project.
AM: If you had any advice for future CHR students, what would it be?
SK: Working at the center is a lot of academic work and research. In order to combat this feeling of “Why does it all matter?,” I feel it’s important to balance all of that out with doing on-the-ground organizing, where you can see an impact. My advice is to make sure that you understand what organizing looks like, and how the work that you do as a researcher, how you can shape the direction it goes in so that it’s useful to people. I think it’s very important to not always remain only in the research, only in the books, only in the spreadsheets. You need to build relationships with other organizers and organizations doing the work, and to make connections between struggles to build a stronger movement.