In 1945, chief American prosecutor Robert Jackson made a key decision for the Nuremberg Tribunal: the court would rely on documentary evidence. This now seems intuitively simple. How else can judicial truth be established? But at the time, Jackson's decision was controversial. Many argued that oral testimony alone, from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, should be sufficient to bring Nazis to justice. Documents, they argued, would be too difficult to procure and not worth the effort.
Like Jackson, the modern human rights movement has relied on documents since its earliest days. Documentary evidence is at the heart not only of legal cases against perpetrators of human rights abuses but also of efforts by victims to create an accurate historical record and thereby establish the truth about violent and repressive pasts.
Documentary materials include not only frayed and yellowing pieces of paper. They also consist of audio and video recordings; letters written from jails, smuggled out by sympathetic guards; daily produced court documents; cassette tapes of perpetrators' confessions; newspaper articles; pamphlets, posters, and mimeographed leaflets; professional records of promotions, firings, and complaints; documents produced by local bureaucrats; and, of course, the written and oral testimony of those who have suffered or witnessed suffering. These are the materials necessary for the struggle against impunity today as well as for historical memory.
The Documents and Confronting the Past Affinity Group focuses on documents, archives, and strategies for dealing with the legacies of past atrocities. Its members include NGOs from Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, and Serbia and Montenegro. With support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Boell Foundation (Germany), the affinity group has held meetings in Belgrade, Berlin, and Phnom Penh, on topics including ownership and custodianship of documents; evidentiary questions (i.e. concerning documents that will be used in future criminal trials); information management systems; documents and statistical validity; documents and memory; preservation and dissemination; and challenging strategic and technical questions about collection.
With the ICTJ, the core members of this group are working on a wide variety of documentation projects:
On the Thai-Burma border, the Transitional Justice Program of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB) is developing a collaborative database called "The Truth Project," which brings together data from all of the diverse organizations documenting human rights violations in Burma.
In Belgrade, the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) has focused since 1992 on documenting international humanitarian law violations committed during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has worked since 1995 to collect, organize, preserve, and analyze materials related to the grave human rights abuses that occurred in Democratic Kampuchea between April 1975 and January 1979.
In Guatemala, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) is a technical, scientific, non-profit organization that carries out forensic-anthropological investigations.
In Iraq, the Iraq Memory Foundation is engaged in documenting the previous regime, compiling oral histories, and developing an artworks and artifacts project.
