Human Rights

Welcome to the Human Rights Research Guide! Human rights is a multidisciplinary subject and research in human rights often requires consultation across disciplinary and methodological grounds. This guide focuses on providing useful resources for accessing various types of information (e.g. legal documents, data, scholarly articles) related to human rights research. For help with subject-specific research questions, please consult our other research guides or reach out to one of our subject librarians for a consultation. See the box below for a quick overview of the pages in this guide.

Eleanor Roosevelt holding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 

adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. 

Alt text: Eleanor Roosevelt dressed in a dark dress holding a poster size copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This guide is intended to help you conduct research in the interdisciplinary study of human rights. 

On this page, you can find some of the resources available at NYU New York related to human rights. 

As you move through the tabs of this guide you will find resources for locating various types of information:

• Finding Books & E-Books for academic books and reference sources on human rights topics.
• Newspaper & Scholarly Articles for relevant article databases and news sources.
• Finding Key Documents to learn more about the types of international documentation related to human rights and how to find it.
• Data Sources for help finding datasets related to human rights issues. 
• International & Country-Specific Resources for sources to find background information on countries, regions, and issues.
  • United Nations for a breakdown of human rights-related agencies in the UN and how to find their resources
• NGOs, Charities, and Non-Profits for organizations that maintain publicly available documentation on human rights issues.  
• Video, Image & Archival Collections for primary source and archival materials (e.g. photos, personal testimonies, video, etc.).

While many of the resources linked in this guide are free and available to the public, some are only available to NYU-users. These resources will be marked with the notice NYU-only.

Here are more Human Rights Watch feeds you can follow.

This guide serves as an overview of human rights resources and can be of use to anyone. It was created with the advisement of Laila Hussein Moustafa at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.