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,

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

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.

A new set of 94 declassified U.S. government documents have been added to the UW Center for Human Rights’ El Salvador FOIA Collection maintained by UW Libraries. The documents in the new tranche cover a wide range of topics, shedding light on the depth of the U.S.’s role in Salvadoran military operations and revealing a previously unknown cache of intelligence records, of which the UWCHR is now seeking declassification.

In recent years, human rights work related to wartime crimes against humanity has accelerated and intensified in El Salvador. While it’s still an uphill battle, the possibility of securing justice in key cases before the courts seems closer than ever before—generating hope among victims, but also more palpable resistance among those accused of crimes.  In

Letter from the Director I‘m not going to lie—it’s been a tough year for human rights. It seems like every day there’s another reason to be discouraged about the state of our world, whether at home or abroad. On one particularly dark day this past February as I prepared to teach my human rights class,

Recent days have brought new developments in the University of Washington’s long-standing lawsuit against the US Department of Defense for access to records pertaining to wartime atrocities in El Salvador. In this case, originally filed in December 2017, the University of Washington seeks the declassification of US documents pertaining to the armed conflict, focusing particularly

On Tuesday, April 2, 2019, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights celebrated the success of a hearing in federal district court regarding its ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the US Department of Defense and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). At the hearing SOUTHCOM agreed to release relevant portions of two previously unseen collections