The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered significant ethical and human rights concerns. While much of the debate focuses on risks such as discrimination, disinformation and algorithmic bias, much less has been written about AI's potential to support human rights practice and scholarship. This article engages with both perspectives, by reflecting on the early development of RedressHub, a tool that integrates AI-assisted information retrieval with a participatory, stakeholder-driven design to map and connect redress initiatives for colonial harm and its legacies across Europe. We discuss the ethical and epistemological implications of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to support the documentation of redress efforts for colonial injustice. Contributing to current debates on process-based, value-driven AI deployment in human rights, we argue that a co-creative approach that engages relevant stakeholders from conceptual design to interface development offers a crucial framework for addressing these challenges. Embedding participation at every stage, this approach has the potential to enhance explainability and contribute to mitigating bias, to open crucial conversations on addressing extractivism and to explore how and under what conditions AI tools can be leveraged to serve the needs and priorities of affected communities.