By Fiona Gorton | Resources and Finance Officer
We’re pleased to be continuing our fundraising efforts with GlobalGiving and we greatly appreciate any and all donations we receive.
Thank you again for the donation you made last year. We are using the money you donated to help us share Omega’s research about the trade and use of weapons and equipment used to commit acts of violence, including rubber bullets, handcuffs, electric shock weapons, and tear gas. This information will help activists more effectively lobby to control the trade and use of tools of torture, and allow legal professionals to better evaluate the legality of use of force incidents. Omega staff also use the database to help journalists and human rights defenders more easily identify equipment used in torture, where it came from, and risks associated.
As part of our efforts to make Omega’s data available to more people, in June 2022 we launched our ‘Arms Fair Repository’ in collaboration with Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). The repository contains information about hundreds of arms and security trade fairs and the companies that exhibit at them. At Omega, we use this data to monitor the activity of arms companies, identify the launch of new and potentially abusive products, and to expose gaps in existing laws and regulations. We also know that this data is useful for researchers, journalists, human rights activists, and others interested in exploring and challenging the global arms trade, which is why it is so important that we make it accessible.
Thanks to your donation, Omega’s arms fair data can now be freely accessed by anyone, either directly via our repository hosted on Github or through our online data browser, which provides a simple and interactive way to explore the insights that the data provides. More information about Omega’s arms fair data is available via our website. We’ve also recently added a section to our website that shares detailed information on the types of weapons and equipment we research. Learn more about these technologies here, and do get in touch if you have questions.
Omega staff continue to research the manufacture, trade and use of law enforcement and security equipment and we are exploringhow other aspects of our data can also be made more accessible.
Please see the GlobalGiving website, Omega’s own website, or get in touch with us (at info@omegaresearchfoundation.org) to learn more about our plans for the future. Through short reports, we will continue to share details of our progress.
If you would like to unsubscribe from our email updates at any time, please do this through the GlobalGiving website directly.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
