History of Uwazi

Human rights defenders rely on information from many sources in order to do their work effectively, from laws and jurisprudence to victim testimonies and resolutions. This information is crucial for ensuring human rights are respected and protected.

However, it’s not enough to simply collect the documents that contain this information. In order to be understood, the documents must be organised in a meaningful way: case documents need to be connected to judgement documents, judgement documents need to be connected to judges, and so on.

It’s for this reason that in 2015 HURIDOCS began to build Uwazi, an open-source platform that allows any human rights project to organise and publish their own document collections. The decision to do so was many years in the making. Over time, we had learned through consultations with human rights organisations that such a tool was sorely needed. Furthermore, we had witnessed firsthand how a well-designed technological solution could put human rights case law in the hands of those who need it most.

In 2010, HURIDOCS partnered with the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) to develop the African Case Law Analyser. The website addressed an enormous problem that we see in many regions – that access to human rights jurisprudence is almost impossible to obtain, hindering the work of human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers.

And several years later, HURIDOCS and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) started to collaborate on SUMMA, a Case Law Analyser for the Americas, to provide access to the Inter-American Court and Commission cases.

After building two Case Law Analysers, HURIDOCS decided to launch Uwazi to address these gaps on a broader scale. We continue to develop new features in response to user feedback, and we are currently working to expand the platform to support human rights investigations that manage large amounts of source documents and media. All the while, we are maintaining our focus on ensuring that Uwazi meets the pressing security needs of human rights organisations.

Significant funding for Uwazi development has been provided by the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL).