This paper argues that personal actualisation of human and personal rights articulated in key internationally recognised policy instruments is significantly impeded without similar recognition of individual rights ‘in and to records’. It reports on a study in which archival literary warrant analysis was applied top-down on 19 such instruments and on professional international guidelines for archiving records relevant to human rights. Warrant was also derived bottom-up from media and personal accounts of documentation and recordkeeping challenges faced by refugees. Based on the results of these analyses, a platform of proposed refugee rights in and to records was derived. These rights are presented together with the warrants from which they were derived, and also juxtaposed with other frameworks emanating out of peace research as well as information, data and machine learning communities in order to demonstrate where there is overlap and divergence in recommendations. Further research is necessary to test whether such a framework addressing refugees’ needs is sufficiently inclusive to encompass any context in which documentation and recordkeeping play key roles in enabling and actualising human rights, and whether rights in and to records should themselves be recognised as fundamental human rights. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Archives recordkeeping rights in records framework Documentation human rights Refugees

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