Human Rights Archive of Chile

The Human Rights Archive of Chile is a documentary archive containing information on human rights violations during the Chilean military dictatorship. It was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in August 2003.[1] The archive has been used as evidence in human rights cases.[2]

Content

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The archive contains information about 3,877 human rights violation cases that were heard by Chile's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.[3][4] This includes around a thousand photographs of missing detainees, as well as audiovisual and press material published between 1973 and 1995 on human rights violations committed during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. It also includes editions of the news program Teleanálisis.

The records that make up the archive belong to eight institutions:[1]

  • Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD)
  • Corporation for the Promotion and Defense of People's Rights (Codepu)
  • Vicariate of Solidarity
  • Justice and Democracy Corporation
  • Foundation for Social Aid of Christian Churches (Fasic)
  • Foundation for the Protection of Children Victims of States of Emergency (Pidee)
  • Chilean Commission on Human Rights
  • Teleanálisis

In 2002 the archive was nominated for the UNESCO Memory of the World register, to which it was accepted in 2003. The nomination statement argued that protecting the archive was important to continued wider discussion about democracy: "To understand the raison d’être of democracy and respect for human rights, it is necessary to know and remember how the dictatorships functioned."[1]

In the following years, the families and organisations who had contributed to the archive campaigned for the government to give it a permanent home.[5] When the Museum of Memory and Human Rights was opened in January 2010, the archive became one of its collections.[6]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c "Human Rights Archive of Chile". UNESCO Memory of the World. UNESCO. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  2. ^ "Archivo de Derechos Humanos en Chile | Servicio Nacional del Patrimonio Cultural". www.patrimoniocultural.gob.cl (in Spanish). Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  3. ^ Nakano, Ryoko (2018-08-08). "A failure of global documentary heritage? UNESCO's 'memory of the world' and heritage dissonance in East Asia". Contemporary Politics. 24 (4): 481–496. doi:10.1080/13569775.2018.1482435. ISSN 1356-9775.
  4. ^ Nakano, Ryoko (2019). "The Unintended Consequences of UNESCO's Documentary Heritage Program: Shaming without Naming" (PDF). ASR Chiang Mai University Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. 5 (2). doi:10.12982/CMUJASR.2018.0006.
  5. ^ Sodaro, Amy (2018), "The Museum of Memory and Human Rights: "A Living Museum for Chile's Memory"", Exhibiting Atrocity, Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, Rutgers University Press, pp. 111–137, ISBN 978-0-8135-9214-5, retrieved 2024-11-28
  6. ^ "Historia". Museum of Memory and Human Rights (in Spanish). Retrieved 2024-11-28.