YouTube has partnered up with WITNESS, an international organization that utilizes video for human rights advocacy, and Storyful, a social network of aggregated news, to create a powerful new outlet that offers the world a new venue to spotlight important stories related to human rights cases around the world. The product of this partnership is a new channel on YouTube simply called Human Rights that curates content about human rights in hopes of educating and prompting action.

The site so far includes playlists that include multiple videos about particular subjects or regions, such as a series on Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, a human rights activist in Bahrain currently detained since last June during the government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Interspersed among the numerous videos about Al Khawaja are brief info placards that introduce the proceeding video. In all, there’s nearly an hour’s worth of video about Al Khawaja’s plight.

In all, there’s 35 playlists on the Human Rights channel that covers everything from the Occupy Wall Street protests to the deaths of journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Syria to a profile on the human rights conditions of North Korea. The playlists juxtapose professional videos from established organizations like Amnesty International and PBS with very raw footage uploaded by YouTube users, as seen in the harrowing in-depth series about a Tibetan nun’s self-immolation to protest China’s occupation of the country.

Anybody can suggest a video for inclusion in a playlist by emailing the YouTube URL as well as pertinent information about the video to [email protected]. Storyful will be checking up on the sources of the videos to make sure they’re the real deal while WITNESS will be moderating channels to make sure the content is calibrated to accurately and effectively inform audiences about the specific human rights issue depicted in the videos.

[Via YouTube Blog.]