Alston, Philip & Sarah Knuckey, The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding: Challenges and Opportunities, in THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS FACT-FINDING (Philip Alston & Sarah Knuckey eds., 2015)
Fact-finding means gathering facts about instances of human rights abuse by governments and other organizations as a means of human rights advocacy. The main methodology employed here is legal intervention human rights organizations. With an increase in mechanisms that governments, nongovernmental organizations and private organizations use in fact-finding there is an increase in criticism of the methods and the interpretive techniques by objective observers. The authors thus argue that there is need for more research in the area of fact-finding missions in terms of what actually goes on in practice. This book does so by collecting a number of essays from authors who are experts in their fields and who are drawn from many disciplines such as international law, political science, and forensics. With less work done in the field of fact-finding the authors seek to find out the extent to which fact-finding missions have multiplied in recent years and the importance of the developments that have happened in fact-finding and changed how it is practiced as well as finding out if human rights fact-finding should be subjected to international shared rules.
Ethics: the origin of this project that led to the collection of these essays is the work done by the two editors in fact-finding missions as Special Rapporteurs in countries such as Brazil and Nigeria. In their work practical and ethical questions were constantly raised since it involved interviewing victims, witnesses, experts and government officials. The authors of the other essays also address issues of ethics in the book
