Open source to help defend human rights

The software, dubbed Karapatan, has been made available off of the Google Code site. It was released on Monday, in celebration of International Human Rights Day.

Karapatan utilises PHP and MySQL to help human rights organisations in documentating and monitoring violations as well as with awareness campaigns.

According to the Google Code details, the toolkit can be used to record victims for each incident. Every victim can be classified based on the violations to them while perpetrators are assigned to the whole incident. The violations fall under a lexicon which can be defined by the user. Specific victim updates such as court cases and file attachments can also be recorded.

The software was developed by the Computer Professionals Union (CPU), an organisation of Filipino programmers, developers and system developers that advocates free software and supports grassroots organisations.

Rick Bahague, a member of the CPU, told Inquirer.net that the project was started three years ago after the Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights, a human rights organisation, asked the group to help document human rights violations in the Philippines.

"So it was really in coordination with them. But it was designed to be generic enough so that other human rights organisations can adopt it for their use even if they are not located in the Philippines," he said.

The CPU has licensed the toolkit under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 "in the hope that it can be useful to many human rights and non-governmental organisations not only in the Philippines".

"These CPU projects prove that FOSS is a viable replacement even for very specific tools of non-governmental organisations," Bahague said. "The toolkit is also our small tribute to many human rights violation victims of the current regime."

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