Human Rights Icons

In partnership with Cyberalpha, the IDCR has developed a set of standardised icons that represent a wide selection of human rights violations. The icons are designed in a way that they can be easily recognised and communicate information about the type of violation and type of perpetrator. Much like the icons used for weather forecasting and military planning, these icons provide a new tool that should be of interest to policymakers and practitioners from the private and public sectors.

The events-data can be supplied either through open sources (e.g. newswires, blogs, tweets, etc.) and crowd sources (dedicated reporting portals) or both. These data can then be fused and structured into a data base that follows the ‘who did what to whom’ format for events-data collection and analysis developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Benetech (see how to use maps for advocacy work at the Tactical Technology Collective for its practical guide). The data can then contain fields on location (or ‘geotagging’) and visualised using the icons.

The project has developed icons for more than 50 human rights violations defined and outlined by HURIDOCS, which draws on International Human Rights Law (IHRL) as found in the international human rights instruments.

For more explanation on the derivation and use of the icons, please find our guide here:

Guide for Using Human Rights Icons

Here are some examples of the new Human Rights Icons.

© 2011 The University of Essex and Cyberalpha all rights reserved.

Request Download

In order to obtain the icon set please provide us with your name and email address so we can send you a link. These are free to use, but please include the following citation in your work: University of Essex and Cyberalpha (2011) Human Rights Icons, Colchester, UK: University of Essex and Cyberalpha.

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