Human rights reporting – the next iteration

It feels like more than a year’s worth of human rights developments have taken place in the last 12 months. Given events in the Middle East and elsewhere,  the FCO’s 2011 Human Rights and Democracy Report should make interesting reading.

Since we launched the online Human Rights and Democracy: The 2010 Foreign & Commonwealth Report on 31 March 2011, we have been publishing updates on developments in our 26 countries of concern every quarter. This is the first year we have done so – a move that has been welcomed by NGOs, parliamentarians and other stakeholders. With this report, those interested can also read, print, search, share and comment on either the whole report, or the individual sections. I discuss some on these developments in my blog Human rights reporting – a reflection.

I’m now working on the 2011 report, but it’s no groundhog day. On the digital side, we’re keen to build on the 2010 version, and make some improvements based on the feedback we’ve received throughout the year. Visitors to the site have told us they appreciate its simplicity, and welcome the ability to comment on different sections of the report. They also like our regular updates on countries of concern, and the fact that we use our social media channels such as @FCOHumanRights to highlight these. The most common criticism of the online presentation we’ve heard is that these quarterly updates can be a bit hard to find. We hope to improve this by dedicating new pages specifically for the updates on each country, and adding highlighting these in the top-level navigation of the website.

While we’re not planning huge changes, sometimes small tweaks can make a big difference to the user experience. We continue to be open to feedback and suggestions for how to improve the online report – and as usual, I’d welcome any comments on this blog.