Archival commentaries 2015
January: Preserving the records of temporary bodies
The world is awash in temporary committees, commissions, panels, and independent experts. Look at, for instance, the United Nations and the Central African Republic (CAR). In December 2013 the Security Council imposed a “sanctions regime” on the CAR and established a Sanctions Committee on the CAR as a “subsidiary organ of the Security Council.” It also created a Panel of Experts on the Central African Republic to monitor the implementation of the sanctions which was “home-based but maintained an almost permanent presence in Bangui throughout the investigation phase of its mandate.” At the same time, the Security Council asked the Secretary-General to establish an international commission of inquiry to “investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and abuses of human rights in the Central African Republic by all parties since 1 January 2013, to compile information, to help identify the perpetrators of such violations and abuses, point to their possible criminal responsibility and to help ensure that those responsible are held accountable.” The Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic is supported by a Secretariat based in Bangui, established by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Meanwhile, in September 2013 the Human Rights Council created the post of Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in the Central African Republic, and through it all the United Nations peacekeeping force, MINUSCA, has been on the ground in the CAR for more than a decade. All of these are non-permanent organizations. http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2014_762.pdf ; http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G13/180/48/PDF/G1318048.pdf?OpenElement; http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minusca/mandate.shtml
But it is not just the UN that has an affinity for temporary bodies. For example, the United Kingdom currently has an Independent Panel Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. The U.S. report on Agent Orange (see below) was the product of experts outside the U.S. government. Google has an outside group looking at its privacy practices. The University of Oregon, following an unauthorized disclosure of records (see below) appointed an independent expert to review the case.
There are many reasons an organization decides to appoint an outside group to look at a specific issue or undertake a particular task: expertise, perceived independence from pressure, reputation, lack of adequate staff members to carry out the investigation along with their regular work. But what does this mean for record-keeping? If we look at the Central African Republic case, the Panel of Experts’ records clearly come under the Security Council, whose records go to the UN Archives in New York, as do the records of MINUSCA. The Independent Expert’s records should go to OHCHR archives in Geneva. The Commission of Inquiry, while established by the Security Council receives “secretariat” support from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, so its records could go either to New York or to the OHCHR archives in Geneva.
But will the records of temporary bodies really end in the archives? Almost all temporary bodies—whether appointed by the UN or a government or private organization—are unaware of the importance of their records. The experts are normally very concerned that their final report is preserved, but they are anxious to complete that task and return to their usual responsibilities. In most cases, the experts have had no instructions on what to consider records, on the distinction between personal papers and official records, on what to do with the records at the end of the temporary mandate. The consequence is that the records of closed temporary bodies often are difficult to locate, may be incorporated in personal papers, may be destroyed or even inadvertently made public prematurely. Some government archives have basic rules of the disposition of records of temporary government bodies (see, for example, the U.S. disposition guidance at http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/grs/grs26.html and the older pamphlet “Managing the Records of Temporary Commissions”), but many probably don’t, nor do the private entities that create temporary bodies.
Just as governments must manage records of transitional justice institutions such as truth commissions, any organization that creates a temporary body needs to ensure that rules for managing records are in place when the temporary body starts. The members of the body should know from the beginning who will be responsible for managing the records, how they should be organized, where they will be stored (including in the computer system to be used) in the short and long term, and how access to them will be controlled. The experts and any staff members of the body should be informed that they are responsible for ensuring that the records they create or receive are filed in official records systems and managed accordingly. Archivists from the archives that will be the future home of the records should work with the members of the temporary body. These bodies may be temporary but their work can have a major impact on an issue, a state, or the world at large. Archivists need to make sure the record of that work endures.
February: Records of prison architecture
Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, Vietnam, is now a museum. One wall displays an architectural drawing of the building as originally constructed by the French in the late 19th century, accompanied by a copy of a requisition for building materials. In the center of the room is a large model of the building as it existed at its greatest extent (it expanded several times). Hoa Lo is famous in Vietnam for holding Vietnamese political prisoners during the French colonial era; it is famous in the United States because it held U.S. prisoners captured during the war in the 1960s and 1970s (the prisoners nicknamed it the “Hanoi Hilton”). It is special site. Most of the prison, however, was torn down in the 1990s and in its place two high rise commercial towers were built. The original design of the prison lives on only in the archival record.
Many types of prisons exist: conventional prisons, military prisons, political prisons, concentration camps, psychiatric hospitals that hold criminally insane patients, juvenile “homes” or detention facilities (see the India item below), immigration detention centers that are essentially prisons (see the Australia item below). Prisons may be constructed for the purpose or may be sites or buildings such as a school or warehouse that—particularly during conflict--are used as temporary prisons. While governments operate the majority of prisons and government archives have the majority of extant prison records, governments may also contract with private industry to build and run prisons. The architectural records of these facilities would be records of whatever corporate body operates the facility; the contractor may or may not be required to send a copy of the architectural drawings to the government. Architectural records of temporary and seized facilities would be held by the owner of the facility.
When archivists consider whether to retain architectural records, the main criteria—as discussed in the ICA publication A Guide to the Archival Care of Architectural Records, 19th-20th Centuries--are the aesthetic and historical value of the records to document the creative process, the profession of architecture, the history of the built environment, and urban and social history generally. But the architecture of prisons also is important for understanding what happens within the prison: from overcrowding to access to air and light to the ability of one prisoner to see what happens to someone else. In prosecutions of prison guards and prison administrators, layouts of the prison facility can be important pieces of evidence. For some cases former prisoners have supplied drawings of the layout of the prison as they remember it; at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia a scale model was created of the architecture of the Omarska prison camp.
Prison architecture is a particular concern for the organization Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. Its website http://www.adpsr.org/home/index provides useful background information for archivists who appraise the architectural record of a place of incarceration, whether a conventional prison or a detention camp. When we look at these records, we need to think not only of the artistry of the architect but also the uses of the facility and the persons who were held there against their will. Institutions and archivists should prevent the destruction of archives that are likely to contain evidence of the violation of human rights, including those of the architecture of prisons.
March: Saving satellite imagery
Ever since a man took a camera up in a balloon in the mid-19th century, we have had aerial photographs. Cameras have gone aloft on kites, on all manner of aircraft, on rockets and with manned space missions, in satellites, in drones and even on the bodies of pigeons. Mapping, surveying and monitoring are obvious uses of contemporary satellite imagery, and increasingly the human rights community is using this tool, albeit in a rather different way. Satellite images of conflict zones are used to locate damage, search for missing persons, identify population and military movements, and monitor sites of special concern, such as cultural heritage locations.
Just during the past year, HRWG News has reported the use of satellite photography to document forced eviction of persons living around a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (issue of 2014-12), estimate the number of deaths at a protest in Cairo in 2013 (2014-08), show deforestation and forced resettlement of indigenous people in Ethiopia (2014-02), identify mass execution sites in Iraq (2014-09), document war crimes in South Sudan (2014-08), demonstrate that the military are building structures for themselves but not for refugees in the northern part of Sri Lanka (2014-08), analyze the destruction at medical facilities in Aleppo and Damascus, Syria (2014-06) and determine the habitation of a prison in Turkmenistan (2014-09). Clearly imagery is an important, versatile new tool. However, as Human Rights Watch noted when it used satellite images to document a systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in northern Nigeria (2015-01), satellite images do not reveal deaths or injuries but when no other information is available “credibly used satellite imagery is the closest we will get to the truth.”
The growing use of this technology in conflict analysis led the American Academy for the Advancement of Science to issue “Satellite Imaging of Cultural Sites in Conflict: A Cautionary Note.” After noting the easy availability of high-resolution commercial satellite images, AAAS wrote, “Researchers and others using this type of information-gathering in sensitive and volatile situations, such as the current conflict in Iraq, face ethical questions related to the public disclosure of such information. They must also consider the technical limitations of satellite technology in analysis.” They warn that even with high-resolution imagery, some objects may appear undamaged if they are small or under cover (such as under trees) and therefore “reports of damage may be unverifiable using satellite technology alone.” But a more serious warning is on disclosure of information gained from the analysis of satellite imagery: “all parties should consider the following questions at a minimum, particularly concerning cultural site analysis in Iraq, when weighing the impact of disclosing research findings:
“What does the affected population gain by our activities?
“What might be the unintended negative consequences of our activities for people’s security, and how can we avoid or minimize these consequences?
“Do the activities take into consideration possible protection threats facing the affected population? Might they undermine people’s own efforts to protect themselves?
“Could the activities inadvertently empower or strengthen the position of armed groups or other actors?”
AAAS invites individuals or organizations to endorse this cautionary statement. http://www.aaas.org/page/satellite-imaging-cultural-sites-conflict-cautionary-note
Archives acquire satellite imagery from many sources: military units, mapping services, aerospace companies, geographical and geophysical organizations and their counterparts in universities and research institutes, and now from human rights organizations. The kinds of access questions outlined above echo the concerns archivists have about some uses of aerial photographs and satellite imagery. When I worked at the U.S. National Archives, which has enormous holdings of aerial and satellite images, a researcher came and asked to see aerial photographs of remote regions of a country well known to have a problem with thefts of antiquities (for a current example, see the story of the statue of a Buddha stolen in 1995 from a village in China—confirmed by local archives--that has now turned up in Budapest http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-03/22/c_134087352.htm ). We made the records available, but I have always wondered whether we abetted plunder. As archivists we cannot and should not police the subsequent use of records by researchers. But we do need to think carefully about the kinds of questions AAAS raises when we make decisions about our use of our holdings in publications, exhibitions, and online portals. Archives are neutral; the use of them is not.
April: Statistics and data collection
“There are lies, damned lies and statistics” is an old saying. April seems to have been the month of statistics, as readers will see in the items in this issue. Partly this is the result of northern hemisphere organizations publishing a winter’s worth of work; partly, too, it reflects the United Nations spring meetings and the flood of reports from both UN groups and NGOS that accompany them.
Some statistics are the planned result of an activity: actively collected like a national census or automatically captured like monitors measuring earth vibrations. These data sets, created in the course of business, are part of the records of the creating entity. In this issue is an item based on the use of collected statistics by researchers in Mexico to look at rates of violence in certain parts of the country and a report about data being collected automatically by insurance companies on policy holders. Some datasets are reported to and used by other organizations: the World Bank’s economic research arm collects datasets on economies all over the world, for example. These secondary users often preserve the datasets and may combine them with other data, but the original collector remains responsible for their archival preservation.
Other statistics are derived from records whose primary purpose was not data collection. In this issue are items about a media group using records of complaint investigations about child care facilities in California, a research group in the Netherlands using death certificates to examine end-of-life care, and researchers in Canada using immigration decisions and finding statistical “institutional bias” against Roma refugees seeking residence in Canada.
“Lies and damned lies” surfaced in April, too. Reuters pointed out the serious problem of missing data on women over 49 in surveys in many countries, and the Overseas Development Institute reported that the poorest people are undercounted worldwide. Amnesty International Canada faulted the police statistics on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and the World Health Organization said the statistics on the use of caesarean sections are inadequate due to lack of a standard way of gathering information.
After a series of police killings of black men, the United States has an ongoing debate about the accuracy of police records and the statistics derived from them. The New York Times published two reports on the problem of “scant data” about police killings: “Under current federal laws, there is nothing requiring any of the 18,000 police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country to report to the public or to the Justice Department anything about shootings involving officers.” That information is kept locally, and compiling that data “is one of the first things the Justice Department does when it investigates a police department for civil right abuses.” Civil society has begun to independently track police homicides nationwide, using mostly media reports that volunteers then compile into online databases. Two of these, reported the Times, recorded about 1,100 police-related homicides in 2014, about double that reported to the FBI in 2013 but apparently roughly the same number from one year to the next. The Times says the data “suggests that any perception that higher numbers of unarmed African-Americans are being killed by the police is recent months is driven by citizens’ posting of unsettling cellphone videos and images.” The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, also a private group, keeps data on how often people shoot police officers, the other part of the picture. Clearly the U.S. needs to reform both its police practices and the records and statistics kept about them. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/us-has-limited-data-on-shootings-involving-police.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/no-sharp-rise-seen-in-police-killings-though-increased-focus-may-suggest-otherwise.html?_r=0
T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month.” Do you suppose statistics would bear him out?
May: Draft Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists in Support of Human Rights
In June 2014 the Human Rights Working Group, with the approval of the ICA Executive Board, posted on the ICA website the draft document, Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists in Support of Human Rights, for six months of public comment. An open session on the draft was held at the ICA’s 2014 annual meeting in Girona, Spain.
By January 2015, 26 responses were received: 12 responses from the archival world (2 archival institutions, 2 archival associations, 3 groups of individual archivists, 7 individual archivists, and the ICA Section of Professional Associations); 11 responses from NGOs in the fields of freedom of information, good government and human rights; and 1 response from a professor of government and 1 from a person who did not identify his affiliation. In total, 136 separate suggestions were made. They varied enormously; For example, one suggested that too much reliance was placed on international instruments while others said additional international instruments, including regional ones, should be referenced. Among the repeated suggestions were to clarify to whom the document is addressed, to state whether the Principles are facts or goals, to provide definitions of terms used, and to tighten the language in both the Preamble and Principles. SPA and the associations recommended expanding the text to include records managers and records management issues. Several commentators were concerned about the language of the “whistleblower” provisions.
The Working Group met in January and, based on the comments, decided that the Basic Principles needed a major revision. For each Principle we added a paragraph clarifying what the principle means and what international authority undergirds it. We reduced the Principles by one, reduced the number of sections from six to five, and revised all the language, with special efforts to clarify the provisions on whistleblowers and on displaced archives. We added two annexes: definitions of the terms used in the Basic Principles, and a list of international treaties, covenants, agreements, opinions and related matter that serve as foundation for the Basic Principles. We sent that draft (version 10) to the Executive Board for consideration at its April meeting, with the suggestion that this revision be posted for a second round of comment.
The Executive Board returned the draft to the Working Group asking for further amendments, specifically to incorporate the records management dimension more fully in cooperation with the ICA’s new Expert Group on Records Management and to consider whether the Basic Principles should also cover “archives at risk.” The Working Group was asked to prepare a revision to be submitted for discussion by the ICA’s Programme Commission at the ICA’s September annual meeting in Reykjavik. Work on the revision has now begun.
Although the current version will not be posted to the ICA website, it is available in English, French and Spanish to anyone who would like to comment on it. If you have commented before, you will want to look at the changes. The Working Group would especially appreciate suggestions on language to incorporate records management concerns, as well as whether the Basic Principles should discuss the responsibility to protect archives at risk from global warming, war or depredation. For further information or for copies of the current version (please specify language) write to either archivesthp@aol.com or giulia.barrera@beniculturali.it.
June: Marriage records
In September 2014 a U.S. woman and her Canadian husband filed with Citizenship and Immigration Canada a “spousal sponsorship application for her immigration to Canada.” They submitted a 532 page package of documents, including “6 pages of wedding receipts, 18 pages of congratulatory wedding cards, 30 pages of wedding photos, 21 pages of plane tickets, 39 pages of emails, 29 pages of cards and love letters, 57 pages of Facebook history, 36 pages of Skype and FaceTime records, and 137 pages of iMessage chat logs,” reported the Hamilton Spectator. However, in May 2015 Canadian “immigration officials requested additional proof their marriage is legitimate.” http://www.thespec.com/news-story/5692350-proof-of-love-for-immigration-canada-532-page-report-isn-t-enough/
At first glance, the package this couple submitted seems extraordinarily complete. But a second look shows that the couple did not submit a copy of either a marriage license (a document giving a couple permission to wed) or a marriage certificate (a document attesting to the completion of the civil contract of marriage). While Immigration Canada, following press inquiry, has made a determination in the case (the nature of the decision was not known when the press wrote the story), if this couple had provided a legal document showing their marriage in New York State, it surely would have made their case easier.
For much of human history and in parts of the world today, marriage was and is a contractual arrangement between families, clans or even political entities, rather than a contract between two individuals. And while many of the countries that were British colonies, such as Canada, recognize common law marriage (that is, a couple that lives together in an arrangement like marriage, holds themselves out as married, but has not had an actual marriage ceremony or obtained legal documents), documentation of the relationship is ever more important in today’s legally-bound world. Why? One measure is the rights and benefits that accrue to the married couple. For example, in 2004 the U.S. Government Accounting Office examined the United States Code to determine the federal rights, responsibilities, and privileges that were provided to married couples. The study identified a minimum of 1,138 statutes in which marital status was a factor. On the state and federal levels, these rights, privileges, and obligations affect areas including family law, taxation, health care law, probate, torts, government benefits and programs, private sector benefits, labor law, real estate, bankruptcy, immigration, and criminal law. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf Another matter is divorce. As lawyers point out, a usual contract between two persons can be broken by the action of either of the parties; however, in a marriage with a contract that involves a third party (the state or the religious authority that certifies the marriage), that third party also must participate in dissolution of the contract (divorce). One legal document (the divorce decree) cancels another legal document (the marriage certificate).
The right of same sex couples to marry was the subject of a major case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, which ruled that a “fundamental right to marry” can no longer be denied because the partners are of the same sex. This affirms Article 16 on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says in part 1, “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
So whether the record of marriage is in a government archives, an archives of a faith-based body, or in a tribal archives, whether it is a record of a marriage between a man and woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, it is a record of truly significant for the human rights of the persons whose names appear on it. Vital records, in every sense of the word.
July: Documenting the trail of a looted object
Looters at Maya sites in Mexico and Moche sites in Peru. Missing pieces at Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples, where ugly slashes show that something was ripped from a wall. Islamic State fighters allegedly selling items taken from archeological sites and institutions like the Mosul Museum. We are heart-sick at these stories. Surely these are crimes against the heritage of us all.
The New York Times ran a long article on an art dealer, Subhash Kapoor, who is awaiting trial in Chennai, India, on charges of theft and smuggling an almost unimaginable 2,662 Indian items which he sold or was planning to sell in the United States, Australia or Singapore. Apparently the police case began when a man in Singapore saw a catalog from Kapoor’s gallery and noticed that he was selling “an extraordinary number” of Indian items. He alerted the Tamil Nadu, India, police department, who alerted U.S. law enforcement. An arrest warrant was issued by India, which was executed by German officials because Kapoor was in Frankfurt at an exhibition, and he was jailed in Cologne until extradited to India. After obtaining search warrants, the U.S. and Indian investigators “compiled an enormous dossier against Mr. Kapoor: emails and databases seized under search warrants; bank-transfer records and shipping forms, the testimony of former associates.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/arts/design/the-ultimate-temple-raider-inside-an-antiquities-smuggling-operation.html?_r=0
The Times followed the movement of one stolen 11th century A.D. bronze saint from its original location in Tamil Nadu to its sale in New York City. The detail the Times published allows a look at the variety of records that could be used to document the stolen item:
1. The statue is in a temple in a village 200 miles southwest of Chennai. Tamil Nadu statues in that region “had been photographed in the 1960s by French archivists from a scholarly institute in India.” Records of an academic institution.
2. The statue is stolen in 2006 and delivered to “the owner of an art gallery in Chennai.” He pays the thieves $3000; perhaps cash transfer to thieves but a record in the gallery’s bank account.
3. The gallery “alerts” Kapoor it has the statue. Probably email business records at both the gallery in Chennai and at Kapoor’s gallery in New York; perhaps also telephone call connection records captured the U.S. National Security Agency for a foreign call.
4. Chennai gallery owner gets export approval for the statue. “The gallery owner shows Indian export officials fake cargo forms” and the officials certify the cargo as “handicraft products” to be delivered to Nimbus Import Export Inc. in the U.S., which is owned by Kapoor. Records of the Indian government; also a copy in the business records of the gallery in Chennai; probably a copy to Kapoor.
5. Chennai gallery owner engages a Chennai export company to take the boxes to a German-registered freighter for transport to New York. Business records at the gallery, the export company, and the freighter’s company.
6. Statue arrives at port in U.S. Freighter provides the “bill of lading” to U.S. Customs. Records with the U.S. government, the freighter company, and probably a copy to the export company and/or the gallery in Chennai to say the crate arrived.
7. U.S. Customs sends notice (paper, email) to Nimbus in New York to say cargo cleared for release. Records with Customs and Nimbus.
8. Nimbus collects cargo. Signs paper receipt for the crate; copies for both Customs and Nimbus.
9. Nimbus delivers to Kapoor’s gallery. Probably email, Kapoor to Chennai galley, saying crate arrived. Kapoor enters the statue in business inventory records, probably a database.
10. Eight days after receiving the statue, a collector buys it. Kapoor provides the buyer “with phony documentation, including a fake letter of provenance signed by an associate in Singapore who owns an art company.” Sale record in gallery’s business records; copies in both Singapore and New York of exchange of correspondence between Kapoor and Singapore associate; record of payment in banks of buyer and seller; documentation in private papers of buyer.
11. Kapoor wires money from his account at HSBC Bank in New York to the owner of the Chennai gallery via Hong Kong. Business record of payment in Kapoor gallery; records of receipt of money in business records of Chennai gallery; bank records of money transfer; probably email exchanged announcing sale.
So for this case we have relevant records from at least seven businesses, three governments, and an academic institution and two sets of personal papers (the man in Singapore who noticed the unusual sales and the buyer in New York). Archives clearly are an essential part of the evidence that protects cultural heritage and helps prosecute those who would convert the common heritage of all humanity to private gain.
August: The need for archival safe havens
All summer we have been consumed by the pictures of refugees: Haitians fleeing the Dominican Republic, Rohingya from Myanmar dying in Thailand, waves of unsafe boats in the Mediterranean carrying people to European shores, the sad spectacle of refugees walking from Budapest to the Austrian border. Humanity despairs at the exodus.
What would you take if you had to flee your home because of war or weather, poverty or plague? You would probably take an identity card of some sort: a government-issued card, a passport, a driver’s license, a social welfare card, a workplace identity badge. You would take money or the documents that allow you to get money (bank cards, account numbers). You might take a photograph or two of those you love. If you were worried that your home might be harmed, you might take a document showing your ownership or your right to live there, but you would have to be thinking ahead to grab that. You might take a marriage license or a birth certificate for your children; you might take something from a doctor showing what medical condition you have and what medicines you take. You would probably clutch a document giving the name and address of a relative living in another country, if you have one.
You would be lucky to cross a border with all those documents. They might be damaged in a rainstorm, lost when a boat sank, seized by border guards who want to strip you of your identity, as Serbian officials did when Kosovars fled into Macedonia in 1999. And if you arrive without any identification, the country where you land will need you to swear who you are and, if possible, get another person or two to also swear that you are you. And they will give you an identity document.
When the crisis is over, you may want to go home and reclaim your apartment, your job, your right to a pension, your health service. But what records will exist to support your claims? Have the records of the government, the business, the health service survived or were they destroyed in the crisis? Here is where the need for archival safe havens comes in. In countries where the risk of damage to archives is great, whether from war or global warming, archivists need to find a trusted repository in a safer location that will hold a security copy of the institution’s most important archives.
The problem, of course, is having a copy that can be sent away for safekeeping. Most archives are not digital, and embarking on a digital copying program in the face of looming disaster is unrealistic. Shipping original non-digital records is a massive job that can only be undertaken with the help of major transportation services, which are not often available in times of crisis. Archivists who believe their holdings are in likely to be in danger in the future need to take steps now, identifying which records are the most important (with particular emphasis on records that support human rights claims), and embarking on a digital copying project for them.
Archivists in safer countries around the world should examine their mandates and their consciences and see whether they can offer a safe haven for digital copies (or, if they exist, microfilm copies) of archives that are at risk. This is entirely different from having a copy and making it available for research use; this is a service equal to an archival safety deposit box in a bank, holding materials that you preserve safely on behalf of other archivists who make the decisions on access to them and can recall them if needed. Archives are a global public good. We archivists must manage their security and preservation together, for the benefit of us all.
September: Human Rights Working Group news
No commentary; instead news of the actions taken by the Human Rights Working Group at the International Council of Archives
October: Archives and corporate social responsibility
Have you ever taken Tylenol for a headache? Have you ever used gasoline pumped from the ground by Exxon? Do you live in a country where the government has made a large land sale to a private investor, either domestic or foreign? If so, stories on all of those are found in this issue.
The fact is that the corporation, particularly the transnational corporation, is a primary shaper of today’s global economy, with powers and policies that affect people around the world. As firm size increases, more of us are affected by the actions of a single company, often located outside our borders. States regulate corporate business, and corporate powers and political systems are often linked, for good or ill.
Corporate social responsibility is the focus of the United Nations’ “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations’ ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework,” which was endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2011. The Principles rest on three “pillars”:
1. the state’s duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business;
2. the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and
3. greater access by victims to effective remedies, both judicial and non-judicial.
Archives are central to the ability of corporations to comply with the Guiding Principles. During the recent ICA annual meeting, the Section of Business Archives (SBA), the Section of Professional Associations (SPA) and the Human Rights Working Group (HTWG) held a joint meeting on the Guiding Principles and the role of archives and archivists in business settings. Facilitated by two staff members from swisspeace, a nongovernmental organization, the outcomes of the meeting were:
1. SBA with HRWG will consider drafting a statement on the importance of business archives to enable corporations to fulfill their roles under the Guiding Principles, with the hope of submitting the statement to the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights. The Forum is held each year and is open to all stake holder groups to discuss the progress on implementation of the Guiding Principles. SBA plans to look at corporate social responsibility and sustainability indexes at its 2016 meeting.
2. SBA may also ask members whose multinational corporations have subsidiaries in Africa how records are managed in their subsidiaries and suppliers.
3. All three bodies will work together to develop a pilot project for understanding the needs of local businesses in Africa for recordkeeping and information management assistance and training. This would be a grassroots effort to identify large local companies, ask each of them who manages their information and where that person is located in the organization, hold an informational meeting, and develop basic guidance on topics and process identified by the participant. It may be possible to link the pilot to ICA’s Africa Strategy and to be able to pay a local person to organize the pilot.
If you are interested in working on one of these projects, please contact the chair of either SBA, SPA or HRWG.
November: Climate change and the threat to archives
If you take the road from Laura (a village named by U.S. sailors after the World War II movie star Lauren Bacall but misspelled) around the atoll to Majuro, the capitol of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, to your right is the Pacific Ocean splashing on the rocks and to your left is the lagoon, hosting half a dozen Japanese fishing boats waiting to load catches of prize yellow fin tuna and barracuda and swordfish. The road gets some shade from palm trees and pandanus, but the stretch of land is so narrow that you can usually see both ocean and lagoon by simply turning your head. And while it sounds like a postcard paradise, it is an Eden under threat from global warming: sea level rises and storm surges could merge the lagoon and the ocean, no matter what sea walls are built.
Small island nations are vulnerable. The Marshall Islands average of 2 meters (6 ½ feet) above sea level and already are subject to violent erosion. A sea level rise of even half a meter would put small island nations like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and the Maldives “in existential danger,” according to the Climate Institute. http://www.climate.org/publications/Climate%20Alerts/Autumn2009/HighStakesforSmallIslands.html The president of Kiribati just bought eight square miles of land in Fiji to relocate his population as necessary http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/01/3455135/island-bought-land-to-escape-climate-change/ On these islands today there is no safe place for archives.
And yet the people who live on these threatened islands create and need to preserve the records of their governments and their larger documentary heritage. UNESCO recently adopted a policy paper on preserving documentary heritage (see below) and the climate conference in Paris secured promises from 196 countries to take measures to reduce global warming. But no one can predict how successful the Paris agreement will be, and it is prudent to assume that for the near future we will see continued global warming, with intensified storm surges, coastal flooding, and coastal erosion.
The problem of safety of archives in states threatened by climate change cannot be solved by the affected nations alone. UNESCO is thinking about archives at risk, and that effort should have a special track for the archives that are endangered by climate change. For the low-lying nations, the only obvious protection for their archives is to place a digital security copy of their most important records in another geographic location. In conversations in November with both UNESCO and the International Council on Archives, we discussed the possibility of convening a joint meeting of the national archivists of the nations in danger from countrywide climate change, with a special focus on island nations, and the institutions willing to be receiving institutions, in order to work out strategies for preservation. We need to move forward—together. We need to move forward—now. Seas don’t wait.
December: 2015 in review
2015 was a year of horrific videos: Islamic State videos of beheadings; police camera videos of violence on the streets of the United States; media images of refugees coming ashore in Greece. It was a year in which truth commission reports were issued (Canada, U.S. State of Maine), new truth commissions were promised (Sri Lanka, Colombia, Panama), and archives began to accept the records of completed truth commissions (Brazil, Canada). Old archives were used to reopen old cases (Chile, Peru). Satellite imagery continued to be an important tool for human rights investigations: crowd sourcing using satellite imagery to map child trafficking in Lake Volta region of Ghana, haunting images of destruction of cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Syria and of Nigerian towns set fire by the Boko Haram rebel group. Medical records were used in Guinea to determine the numbers of wounded during post-election violence; an increasing number of businesses found themselves confronted with documentation on their practices that had a negative impact on human rights. Quite a year.
Looking over the 2015 issues of HRWG News, here are a variety of other stories:
January: A court in Guatemala convicted Pedro Garcia Arredondo, former head of a special investigations unit of the police, of homicide and crimes against humanity for his leadership of the 1980 siege of the Spanish Embassy during which 37 protesters and hostages died. Video footage proved Arredondo was present at the Embassy during the siege and historical archives of the National Police identified those responsible for the operation as Arredondo and two others.
February: The first child in Bosnia was registered with the nationality “Bosnian.” When the parents went to register the birth with the municipality, they were told “Bosnian” was not acceptable and he must be “Bosniak, Croat, Serb or Other,” but at the end of January the municipality “decided there were no legal restrictions preventing anyone from being registered as a Bosnian.” The parents and the other children planned to reregister as Bosnians also “to fight a system that is based on ethnic divisions,” the father said.
March: Iceland is well known for its nationwide program to obtain DNA information on its population. Geneticists are pairing the DNA results with national genealogy databases to look for diseases that are unusually common in relatives—a sign that they share a genetic mutation.
April: Pope Francis ordered the Vatican to open its files on Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983) during which an estimated 20,000 people were made to “disappear” by the regime.
May: Researchers studied death registries in southern European countries to establish how many migrants have been recorded as dying in transit. They discovered that only 40% of the bodies of migrants found since 1990 have been identified.
June: The International Committee of the Red Cross opened its archives for the period 1966-1975, covering the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970), the Vietnam War (1964-1975), the military junta in Greece (1967-1974), the coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), the ICRC’s work in South Africa during Nelson Mandela’s detention, the Cyprus conflict, and the wars of independence in Mozambique and Angola. An estimated 97% of all files are open.
July: The United Nations’ Independent Panel of Experts issued its report on the 1961 plane crash that killed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and 15 other passengers. The panel said it found “significant new information” that the plane was brought down by “aerial attack or other interference.” Neither the United States nor the United Kingdom provided access to all the archives that the panel requested, and the panel urged further disclosures of information by UN member states.
August: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported that for the first time in five decades, mortality rates increased among Palestine refugee newborns in Gaza. To get the data, UNRWA asked all mothers who had more than one child and who came to one of the 22 UNRWA health centers to register their last-born child for immunization, to tell them whether their preceding child was alive or dead. The information from interviews with 3128 mothers was documented on data collection sheets and used with “child health records and antenatal records” to determine mortality rates. The researchers concluded that “inadequate neonatal care” is contributing to the sad trend.
September: Taiwan issued new court regulations to ensure that video footage, audio recordings and written court transcripts of cases where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty or life imprisonment are stored permanently in the central archives and is made available to defendants on request.
October: Tanzania launched a nationwide drive to help parents register their children's births by mobile phone. A health worker will send the baby's name, sex, date of birth and family details by phone to a central data base and a birth certificate is issued free of charge within days.
November: Algeria’s former counter-terrorism chief, who was responsible for leading a war against various groups that lasted over 20 years, was sentenced to five years in prison for breaching orders and destroying documents.
December: Since March, when Syrian opposition activists posted online thousands of post-mortem photographs smuggled out of the country by a police photographer who defected in 2013, families of the missing have been looking for the fates of their loved ones by sifting through the grim photographs.