Through the Net to freedom: information, the Internet and human rights

The new tools of information and communication play an increasingly important role in many organisations, providing new opportunities and new challenges. The human rights world, for which good quality information is a prime requisite and information management is a vital skill, is equally faced with the opportunities and threats of these tools in promoting and protecting human rights. Human rights organisations have been quick to adopt the Internet and it is having a great number of impacts upon their work, creating change, providing new means of campaigning and challenging abuses of human rights. Yet technology also introduces new barriers to human rights activity: issues of censorship, regulation and control are fundamental to this work.