A few days ago, a neighbor thanked me for my work in human rights. She shook her head as she said it, as if to convey the impression that our work is a depressing act of service performed amid challenging times—but I told her it’s quite the opposite.

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights has received the first major cache of newly-declassified documents from our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US Department of Defense, filed in December 2017. The documents, which are publicly accessible via UW Libraries, reveal key operational details about military operations, deeply relevant to many families’ ongoing search for basic information about the context in which loved ones were victimized or abducted. Sadly, they also reveal frustrating limitations to agencies’ compliance with FOIA, underscoring the need for greater transparency across the board.

A new report from the UWCHR’s Unfinished Sentences project features the story of former Salvadoran political prisoner Rafael Segura, whose legal case represents progress for survivors of torture and arbitrary detention during the civil war in El Salvador.

UW Center for Human Rights research intern Grace Sorenson reflects on a trip to El Salvador, where she observed workshops in which survivors of the El Mozote massacre presented their interpretations of declassified U.S. government documents about the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency in their country.

At the UW Center for Human Rights, student researchers use the Freedom of Information Act (also known as FOIA) and state public records laws to investigate local and international human rights issues, in partnership with human rights organizations working for justice and accountability. Meet recent members of our research team in our new video.

On December 6, 2017, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of El Salvador ordered the Salvadoran Public Prosecutor’s office and Ministry of Defense to carry out a new investigation of the disappearance of the Rivas Clímaco siblings, five children who were forcibly disappeared during a 1982 military operation. The Chamber’s ruling cites as evidence a

In November 2017, UWCHR director Angelina Godoy, accompanied by UW students Emily Willard, Angie Tamayo, and Clare Morrison, traveled to El Salvador to attend the National Assembly of Armed Conflict Victims. The assembly was the first to be held following the 2016 repeal of an amnesty law which had blocked efforts to investigate crime against

Decades after the infamous massacre of El Mozote, the fight for accountability continues. The massacre of El Mozote was committed during “Operation Rescue,” a counterinsurgency operation spearheaded by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion in December of 1981 in the department of Morazán in northeastern El Salvador. Over several days, the Salvadoran military killed at least 978

In the New York Review of Books, journalist Jonathan Blitzer profiles UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy and draws on research by our Unfinished Sentences project documenting retired Salvadoran Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez’s command of army units implicated in war crimes: Godoy is the director of the university’s human rights center, a small, interdisciplinary body run by a few

When 93-year-old Don Tacho Pereira took the stand this June in the rural town of San Francisco Gotera, El Salvador, he made history. Don Tacho lost seven family members in the December 1981 massacre of El Mozote; he only survived because he was away from home during the three-day killing spree that many still consider