Commentary: Year in Review
We, Janus-like, both look forward to a new decade and look back at the events of the year just past. Here are items from each month of the News in 2019 that, taken together, illustrate the diversity of human rights issues that involve archives. Best wishes for the year ahead!
January. Some U.S. police departments are finding it too expensive to manage and store the records of the body cameras their officers wear.
February. Facebook employs about 15,000 persons as “content reviewers” to moderate posts and delete those containing hate speech, violent attacks, graphic pornography and other images; this review takes a psychological toll on the reviewers.
March. The European Court of Human Rights, citing Soviet KGB documents, issued a landmark ruling that Soviet repressions against Lithuanian partisans can be treated as genocide. The case is on appeal.
April. The president of the recently concluded Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission said she regretted very much the “sore lack of documents” provided to the Commission from the archives of the political police.
May. In Guatemala the Historical Archives of the National Police (AHPN) was under threat from the Minister of the Interior; the situation has moderated since May but remains unstable.
June. The nongovernmental Syrian Legal Development Programme published “The Human Rights and Business Toolkit for Syria” to help human rights defenders identify human rights issues linked to business activity and hold “perpetrators of business-related human rights abuses to account.”
July. Akevot, a nongovernmental organization in Israel, published a report on the “Ministry of Defense mechanism to conceal archival records in various archives,” including those needed for understanding the 1948 displacement of Palestinians.
August. The High Court of Bangladesh ruled that “women need no longer declare if they are virgins on marriage certificates.”
September. Studies using criminal history records from the U.S. and Denmark found that a significant percentage of offenders who gave a DNA sample upon arrest were less likely to reoffend after release.
October. A court in Northern Ireland ruled that oral history interviews of former Irish Republican Army members about events during the “Troubles” could not be used as evidence because both interviewee and interviewer had a “clear bias.”
November. Climate research using satellite imagery, LandScan population data, and artificial intelligence found that within a mere three decades rising sea levels could regularly flood lands currently home to 300 million people.
December. Records of the University of Cape Town’s medical school enabled researchers to find the living descendants of 9 San and Khoe persons whose 100-year-old skeletal remains are housed there. At the request of the families, the University facilitated research into the native San and Khoe people and will return the remains to the families.