Human Rights Documents in Sites on the Internet

Thanks to the cooperative efforts of the University of Minnesota Law School and the West Publishing Company, human rights activists, scholars, and students now have World Wide Web access to more than 90 significant human rights documents, including treaties, declarations, and other authoritative materials.

The Human Rights Library web pages (http://www.umn.edu/humanrts) provide access to items such as the International Bill of Human Rights, the Charter of the United Nations, decisions of the Human Rights Committee, data from the African Human Rights Resource center, as well as documentation on war crimes, asylum, and refugees. A sophisticated search engine allows keyword searching of the site's documents.

There are other useful Internet sites for those with an interest in human rights including: the Directory of Human Rights Resources produced by the Institute for Global Communications (http://www.igc.org/hr/), the Human Rights Gopher, a collaborative effort of various nonpartisan organizations (gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000/1), Diana: An International Human Rights Database sponsored by the Center for Electronic Text in the Law (http://www.law.uc.edu/Diana/), and Amnesty International Online (http://www.io.org/amnesty/).

To visit these sites, type wings at your campus e-mail system prompt and type the above URLs at the "Go" command. The same URLs will be used by those who search the Web and Gopherspace with a graphical browser such as Netscape. For assistance in connecting to the Internet via UB computer accounts, contact the Computing Center's Help Desk at 645-3542. For advice on identifying human rights information resources, contact Nina Cascio, LWLCASCI@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU, Law Library, 645-2633.

- Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries