Online Memorial to Iranian Victims

Roya and Ladan Boroumand might be the first to say that they are not "techies". But you would hardly know it from looking at the beautiful website they just released. Their website, found at http://www.abfiran.org/english/memorial.php, is an on-line memorial honoring over nine thousand victims allegedly killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran since the revolution in 1979 and an extensive library of documents relating to human rights and democracy.

Roya and Ladan are the founders of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation (ABF) named in honor of their father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was assassinated allegedly by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Paris on April 18, 1991.

Our Human Rights Program has been advising and working with the ABF since 2002. They are using our Analyzer human rights database system to collect information about the victims in Omid, which is then published to the website. Analyzer enables the ABF to process a mass of overlapping information recording all available sources so that the reported data can be traced to its sources.

Omid, named for the word "hope" in Farsi, is truly unique and inspired. An extensive public archive, Omid intertwines the fate of victims with a discussion about the inherent human rights which they were denied. By placing Omid on the Internet, Roya and Ladan hope to reach Iranians in Iran and all over the world (as long as access to the site is not blocked in Iran) and encourage friends and relatives of victims of the Islamic Republic to contribute and make changes to it. More broadly, they hope to generate dialogue about the truth and price of living under an ideologically driven regime.

Talk about technology serving humanity! Benetech is proud to contribute to this project.

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