From: Canada Tibet Committee, Montreal. Thursday, July 6th, 1995

In an effort to increase access to human rights information, seven human rights monitoring organizations have begun to centralise their material on the Internet. Amnesty International (AI), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Human Rights in China (HRIC), Human Rights Watch (HRW), Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, PEN, and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have created a "Human Rights Gopher" - a series of menus simplifying access to Internet resources and designed to provide up-to-date information for journalists, academics, health professionals, or anyone with access to the Internet.

The human rights organisations hope to broaden the distribution of their information and speed up their ability to communicate - both with one another and the public at large. Internet users will be able to read and download the text of action alerts, press releases, executive summaries of reports, letters to government officials, newsletters, and select reports the same day that they are issued. Copies of reports, most of which are not readily found in bookstores, can be ordered easily from on-line catalogues.

Those using the Internet are encouraged to access the Human Rights Gopher by way of the address "humanrights.org, port 5000" or the URL: gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000.

Those with access to educational or corporate sites should be able to visit the gopher by entering: gopher.humanrights.org 5000. Gradually the "Human Rights Gopher" will be posted in many on-line services on other gophers.

The current organisers invite other like-minded groups to join in this effort. The institutional participants must be independent, non- governmental, non-partisan organizations that regularly gather and disseminate information about human rights practices. Each organization takes sole responsibility for the content of its menu.

The Human Rights Gopher is administered by the Institute for Global Communications, a non-profit computer network and Internet service.

For further information regarding the Human Rights Gopher, please contact any of the above mentioned organizations or:

Robert Kimzey

Human Rights Watch

485 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10017-6104

tel: 1-212-972-8400 extension 297

fax: 1-212-972-0905

email: