Footprints 2.0 database (North Korea)

Footprints is an open archive of cases of arbitrary detention, abduction and enforced disappearances committed in and by North Korea since the 1950s.

Footprints 2.0 is a joint civil society project to document and publish information concerning reported cases of arbitrary detention, abduction and enforced disappearances committed in and by North Korea, including the victims, perpetrators, proceedings to seek redress, relevant human rights instruments and North Korean resources. The open, accessible and searchable online database also provides relational and geospatial information to the users.

The collaboration between HURIDOCS and the Transitional Justice Working Group included a comprehensive data clean-up, automatic translation from Korean to English, the migration of nearly 100,000 historical victim records, and newly designed data visualisation pages. These enhancements make the database more user-friendly and informative, bringing almost 100,000 crucial stories to light.

Creating a resource for the transitional justice movement

A coalition approach can make for more effective human rights campaigns, and this is something that the TJWG team understands well. Footprints brings together data collected by several organizations working on cases of people taken in and by North Korea, with the aim of cultivating synergy amongst their different streams of advocacy work.

Read more about the collection: “A new database project is memorializing the ‘footprints’ of people taken by North Korea”