Filling Gap in Human Rights Data
The project enhances the systematic documentation of human rights violation in Switzerland by developing digital methods for media analysis of Swiss media for a more comprehensive identification of cases involving lethal outcomes.
Factsheet
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Schools involved
School of Social Work
School of Engineering and Computer Science - Institute(s) Institute for Social and Cultural Diversity
- Strategic thematic field Thematic field "Humane Digital Transformation"
- Funding organisation BFH
- Duration (planned) 15.08.2026 - 31.12.2026
- Head of project Dr. Claske Dijkema
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Project staff
Peter Alfred von Niederhäusern
Prof. Dr. Peter Neuenschwander
Livia Zöbeli -
Partner
humanrights.ch
Border Forensics - Keywords Data; human rights; human rights violations; violence; racism
Situation
The Office against Discrimination & Racism raises awareness, provides information, and connects relevant stakeholders around issues of discrimination and racism in Switzerland. It advocates for improved access to justice for victims of racist discrimination. Key aspects of its advocacy are its information platform; the coordination and drafting of the NGO report on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD); and its Counseling Network for Victims of Racism (since 2005). One of its key areas of advocacy is the documentation of human rights violations in the context of the deprivation of liberty (imprisonment, administrative detention, or liberty restricting measures in psychiatric institutions). Relevant data are key to advocacy work but important gaps exist. Currently its press monitoring is carried out manually, through scanning a limited number of newspapers. Due to important constraints in time and human resources this method has serious limitations. The aim of the project is to develop methods for the automated scraping of the press database Swissdox.
Course of action
IT specialists based at the School of Engineering and Computer Science will develop an algorithm to systematically search the Swiss press database for cases of human rights violations with lethal consequences in the context of the deprivation of liberty. This algorithm will be used with Swissdox@LiRI, which facilitates quantitative and/or computational language and media research and is designed for big data analyses. Together with expertise from humanrights.ch and the Institute for Social and Cultural Diversity (Social Work) categories of othering will be identified that play a role in these human rights. The BFH project team does not start from scratch but will use the algorithm developed by Border Forensics (BF) to search the press database of Le Temps on police-related deaths as starting point. The code repository for BF’s Archive of Absence is published on github (CC licence). Each incident will undergo a two-stage coding. The classification framework is structured around two intersecting dimensions: modes of death and processes of othering. Two independent researchers will code every case for date, location, demographic attributes, situational context, cause of death and othering processes involved.
Result
The project substantially enhances humanrights.ch’s case documentation by transforming a largely manual press screening process into a systematic, automated process. Currently, analysts identify relevant cases through time-intensive, manual searches, which limits coverage. The proposed algorithm, applied to Swissdox@LiRI, enables continuous, large-scale and transparent scanning of Swiss media, allowing for more comprehensive and timely identification of cases involving human rights violations with lethal outcomes. Combined with a structured classification and coding framework, this significantly strengthens data quality, consistency, and analytical depth. For advocacy, the resulting dataset provides a more robust empirical basis to identify patterns, highlight structural issues such as processes of othering, and substantiate evidence-based policy recommendations and public interventions.
Looking ahead
The main steps in the project are the development of the classification framework; the development algorithm for scraping the Swissdox@LiRi database; analysis of the cases; developing an interface to make the data available to a wider audience.
