WITNESS is a global human rights organization known for pioneering video advocacy. By training activists, citizen witnesses, and partner groups to use video strategically, WITNESS helps document abuse, strengthen public understanding, and support human rights campaigns around the world.

OVERVIEW

• Project summary: Human rights organization that engages advocates, citizen witnesses, and key stakeholders in policy, law, media, and academia on the use of video to address diverse human rights issues around the world.
• Narrative challenge: Ensuring that the changing media and technology landscapes better protect human rights, and that people using video to create change can do so safely and effectively.
• Evaluation metrics: Number of training resources created, and activists and citizen witnesses trained and supported; adoption of new human-rights-friendly standards and practices in the technology and international criminal-justice fields.
• Websites: Witness.org Overbrook.org

The 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles cops might have been just another incident relegated to police logs had it not been for a witness. Standing on his apartment balcony, a man named George Holliday recorded the episode on his Handycam, and the resulting video quickly made its way onto TV screens worldwide, igniting public outrage over police brutality and racism.

The video’s powerful impact helped propel an idea that musician and activist Peter Gabriel already had; WITNESS was formally founded in 1992 to “give cameras to human rights activists around the world,” and has since grown into a much larger organization using what it calls “video advocacy.”

How WITNESS Helped Pioneer Video Advocacy

“Stories are a critical part of our overall human rights strategy,” says WITNESS executive director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm. For a video clip to make sense—much less to affect change—it needs to be “put in the context of a larger story about a human rights situation,” she says. The video of the Rodney King beating, though not connected to WITNESS, demonstrates the point: it resonated precisely because it was widely understood as evidence of a pattern of abuse by the L.A.P.D. and, through a wider lens, as part of the centuries-long history of institutional racism in the United States. How a story is framed, then, shapes the impact a witness’s video can have.

From its inception, WITNESS worked to outfit human rights groups worldwide with video cameras, at a time when such equipment was more of a luxury; the organization soon started to complement the technology with hands-on training, so as to best support partner groups on their issue-driven campaigns. In the U.S., for example, WITNESS’s ongoing Eyes on ICE project has used video case studies and community-centered storytelling to expose immigration abuses, support immigrant communities, and strengthen advocacy around detention and deportation. As the landscape changes yet again, WITNESS is shifting its focus once more.

“Millions of people use
video to expose human
rights abuses. For a video
clip to have impact, it
needs to be authenticated,
seen by the right people,
and put in the context of
a larger story about a
human rights situation.” —
Yvette Alberdingk Thijm

“Our strategy has to keep pace with changes in technology,” says Alberdingk Thijm. In an era when people can record video on their mobile phones and distribute it online, access to technology is no longer the biggest challenge. Instead, she says, the central question is how to “work with allies to build a safer and more conducive ‘ecosystem’ for human rights.”

Tools and Training for Human Rights Activists

To that end, WITNESS has developed soup-to-nuts resources that support the entire human rights field. These include a free online Video Advocacy Planning Toolkit and curriculum, which includes a module on “Storytelling for Change”; the ObscuraCam and InformaCam phone apps made in partnership with the Guardian Project; successful advocacy for YouTube to add an anonymity feature to its platform; a partnership with Storyful on the YouTube human rights channel; an ever-growing archive of human rights video footage, and a guide to how to archive such footage; as well as a peer network and other programs to support video-for change activists.

For the Overbrook Foundation, which funds human rights and environmental conservation, the interest in WITNESS springs from a belief that “the advocacy organizations that are going to have the biggest impact are those that are either making media, influencing media, or providing media tools and training to other organizations,” says the foundation’s president, Stephen A. Foster.

“In contemporary communications, you have to abandon traditional ideas about big media mentions,” he adds. “The question now is, how do you get your messages out to your constituencies, and how do you hear from those constituencies in ways that will bolster your work?” The better WITNESS addresses such questions, the more people will be equipped to expose—and contextualize—the kinds of abuses captured in the Rodney King video, and the many others taking place around the world.

Read the “Storytelling for
Change” module in WITNESS’s
curriculum on video advocacy.

FAQ About WITNESS and Video Advocacy

What is video advocacy?
Video advocacy is the strategic use of video to document abuse, build public understanding, and support policy or social change.

What does WITNESS do?
WITNESS is a human rights organization that helps activists, citizen witnesses, and partner groups use video safely and effectively to expose abuses and strengthen advocacy.

How are people protected in video advocacy?
People are protected through informed consent, privacy safeguards, secure handling of footage, and careful decisions about when and how video is shared. Effective video advocacy aims to document abuse without putting witnesses, survivors, or communities at greater risk.

Why is storytelling important in human rights work?
Storytelling gives context to footage, helping audiences understand why a video matters and how it fits into larger patterns of abuse and advocacy.

How has technology changed video advocacy?
As phones and online platforms made video easier to record and share, the challenge shifted toward safety, verification, privacy, archiving, and reaching the right audiences.