I am very pleased to have just begun a position at the French National Archives, in the Ancien Régime section. While on leave from the French civil service over a number of years, I had university and research posts in Chile and the United States. Before my time in the academic world, I worked in French departmental archives, the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (film production archives of the French National TV) and at the Direction des Archives de France, in the division that sets archival policies and norms.

When I arrived in Chile in 1993, the country was still dealing with the experience of its 17-year of dictatorship and asking itself, what happened? As a historian as well as archivist by training, teaching very recent history there was a testing ground for the discipline: could we begin to explain a troubled recent past in a rigorous way? In Chile and in neighboring countries, the last two decades have been a time to establish a great many truths about what the State had done – and to make reparations to those it had wronged. During my years in the region, I did pro bono consultancies in Human Rights archives for the State and various NGOs in several countries.

Aside from my principal responsibilities at the French National Archives, I retain a strong ongoing interest in Human Rights archives – specifically the records produced by human rights NGOs – their origins, typology, arrangement and current value – and to a lesser extent, State archives of transitional justice. I am delighted to join the new Archives and Human Rights group and want to thank Perrine Canavaggio and the ICA for this initiative.

These archives raise new and complex issues for which Latin America can be regarded as a kind of laboratory. This is a dynamic area right now, and I want to share a sense of optimism about all that is happening there. The group and its newsletter can help make known a range of recent initiatives taken by human rights organizations (and increasingly by the State as well) to preserve, organize and describe their collections which can inspire others. At the same time, the issues they address and the limitations they try to overcome will be familiar to other colleagues in different parts of the world. In this respect, the AHRG can be an important clearing-house for information, experiences and ideas to which I hope to contribute and for which I will be grateful.

Anne Perotin-Dumon