Eyewitness Video’s Role as a Policy-Oriented Mechanism for Human Rights

This paper examines eyewitness video's role as a policy-oriented mechanism for human rights by mapping out why and how human rights collectives have been aspiring to professionalize video activism. It shows how the systematic approaches to video production, standards, and training help these collectives tap more prominently into the institutional and legal environments where human rights agendas are developed, discussed, and implemented. The paper argues that the professionalization efforts result in a proxy profession that places activist and other eyewitness videos into institutional and legal service. These pragmatic policy achievements, however, may come at the expense of using video more creatively to advocate for bold programs for human rights and social change.