Background

Since the founding of the Committee for Justice (CFJ), it has defined its vision, mission and strategic goals as protecting victims' rights on the long term, supporting victims on the short term, assisting institutions working in defending human rights and enabling them to work safely. The goal is accomplished by providing documented, accurate and credible information and data that can be relied upon in raising awareness of violations, identifying victims, and advocacy activities in order to achieve justice for victims, to compensate them, and to combat impunity.

To achieve this, efforts have focused on monitoring and documenting violations against victims perpetrated by the pillars of the justice system, including the arrest, investigation and trial authorities, the system of punishment and reform, in addition to the legislative and legal environment, policies and practices related to the justice system.

CFJ workers and those interested in the human rights situation in Egypt face many obstacles related to information and data of human rights violations, and the supporting evidence and documents, on top of which is: the absence of official data, information and statistics from the institutions of the Egyptian state, targeting human rights defenders, lawyers and cooperating activists from human rights organizations, as well as amending the legislative and legal structure that allows the legal destruction of evidence and documents, the protection of human rights violators, legalizing impunity policies, the propaganda campaigns promoting the official narrative of the state and the control of the prevailing narrative of events. In addition, many actors in the Egyptian human rights community are compelled to restrict the circulation of information and limit access to it, in addition to the state of polarization resulting from political developments.

Database

The Justice Watch Archive is a database that allows human rights defenders in Egypt and the international community to have direct access to data and information on human rights victims in Egypt, in addition to documents, so that they can perform the roles assigned to them in an optimal manner to defend the victims. The Archive is a collaboration between CFJ and HURIDOCS using the Uwazi tool that enables human rights defenders to create, manage and analyze information and data, including documents, evidence, and complaints.

Goals

  1. Raising awareness of patterns of human rights violations and introducing victims.
  2. Giving a detailed picture of the data published in CFJ reports in a way that supports its credibility.
  3. Providing easy access to a comprehensive understanding of the context and circumstances surrounding the violations, by building models for human rights data and information that facilitate the disclosure of the relationships between them and the understanding of their interconnectedness.
  4. Helping researchers and human rights defenders by providing an open-source database and the ability to search and thematic filters.
  5. Presenting graphs and statistical analyses in the form of models that enable access to the origin of data and its relationship to these analyses.
  6. Making information available to all in a way that does not conflict with the interests of the victims and the ‘Do no harm’ principle.