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

On June 3, 2025, a court in rural El Salvador read the text of its historic verdict, for the first time holding high-ranking former military men accountable for the violence against civilians that characterized the country’s long and bloody armed conflict. The case involved the March 1982 killings of Dutch journalists Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper,

Since 2012, UWCHR researchers have been working in partnership with Salvadoran human rights defenders to uncover new documentation about atrocities committed in the context of the Salvadoran armed conflict. We began this work at the urging of former political prisoners in El Salvador, who were urgently pressing their government to allow access to its records

On the 35th anniversary of the FENASTRAS bombing, UWCHR revisits case Thirty-five years after the deadly October 31, 1989 bombing at the headquarters of the FENASTRAS union federation in San Salvador, researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights have continued their search for information pertaining to this attack, which has never been

Written by Nicole Grabiel Buenos Aires is hot in December. I knew this, theoretically at least, before UW Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) director Angelina Godoy, associate director Gai-Hoai Nguyen, and I boarded our flights to the Argentine capital. I had packed linen pants, my lightest tops, sunscreen, a water bottle, and my trusty pair

The below text is featured in the UWCHR 2022-2023 Annual Report. 45 Years after the National Guard of El Salvador Killed Efraín Arévalo, His Family Bids Him Farewell By Víctor Peña, Translated from Spanish by Max Granger Reprinted with permission from El Faro See the original article here. The National Guard of El Salvador executed

I started my fellowship with Cristosal on the 6th of September of 2021 and worked with the organization until the end of November of 2021. Cristosal is a human rights organization based in the northern region of Central America, a region that is made up of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Cristosal has offices in

Research Informs Debates Over Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center For years, people detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma have reported human rights concerns, though a lack of transparency regarding the facility’s operations has made these difficult to investigate independently. Recent years have seen Congressional inquiries, cases in federal court, and numerous campaigns by advocacy

When I first learned about the Freedom of Information Act, I pictured something resembling a high-security vending machine: you punch in what you want and, instantly, pages upon pages of high-level, top-secret information are dispensed on command. Unfortunately, this paints a somewhat unrealistic picture of the work we do at the UW Center for Human

Updates from UWCHR’s various projects from our 2019-2020 Annual Report: Family separation in the Pacific Northwest, our Immigrant Rights Observatory, ICE Air and deportation flights, Unfinished Sentences El Salvador, and the Panama Files and other work for access to information as a human right.