Archival commentaries 2016
January: Archives and anti-corruption investigations
It was a gift, said Malaysia’s Attorney General. A gift of nearly $700 million transferred in March 2013 from Saudi Arabia’s royal family to the personal bank account of Malaysia’s Prime Minister. And, said the Attorney General, the Prime Minister gave all but $61 million of it back! And, even more curiously, “the Saudis asked for nothing in return for the gift.” The Attorney General ordered Malaysia’s anticorruption body to close its investigation into the case. The records of the closed investigation should go to the National Archives for safekeeping. (For story, see http://www.marketwatch.com/story/skepticism-over-Malaysia-PMS-700-Million-gift-from Saudis-2016-01-26)
As fascinating as the Malaysia situation is, it is hardly the only current government corruption allegation. Nigeria has an investigation in progress of alleged massive fraud in arms procurement, and the former head of the air force has been arrested. A massive scandal in Guatemala has both the former president and the former vice-president in jail. Corruption in Ukraine was a factor in the Maidan revolution (remember the former president’s lavish estate and the documents found there). Alleged corruption in countries on every continent, it seems.
Archives clearly have a very important role in anticorruption investigations, both as evidence of the alleged corruption and as evidence of the prosecution, whether weak or robust. But what does anticorruption have to do with human rights? Many kinds of corruption exist, of course, from the free lunch for the restaurant inspector so he won’t turn in an unsanitary kitchen to percentages of the money in a government contract paid into a personal account. But no matter what kind of corruption it is, it affects the human rights of people living in the country in at least two ways. First, some corruption directly affects people exercising their rights. Think, for example, of government forces, police or military, protecting a big private company’s mining operation and beating protesters whose homes and health are at risk from the mine. Or the case of bribes to allow shoddy and dangerous products into the marketplace or to price essential goods or services beyond the reach of most people. Second, corruption takes funds away from the resources available to the government, which means inadequate money for schools, health services, honest judicial systems. For all those reasons and more, records and rights, corruption and anticorruption, all belong in the same sentence.
February: Trustworthy records
According to Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (who lived in the first century BCE), the Acadine fountain in Sicily had magic properties. Writings were thrown in to it to be tested: if genuine, they floated; if spurious they sank to the bottom. For over 2000 years people have been trying to figure out what writings to trust.
The trustworthiness of records was in question in a number of news items in February. Most startling, perhaps, was the story that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sometimes plants false documents in its internal files to mislead its own staff. A false declaration that two children were abandoned and were therefore eligible for international adoption is at the heart of a case referred to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights.
Then there were stories about the creation of false or misleading statistics. Takata Corporation apparently reported false test results on its deadly auto air bags. A police office in New York City is challenging the police department’s pressure to arrest people for minor offenses to keep statistics sup and avoid “dragging down the arrest rate.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/magazine/a-black-police-officers-fight-against-the-nypd.html Colombia is still coping with the “false positives” scandal that blew open in 2008 when the public learned that members of the military killed poor or mentally impaired civilians, dressed them as guerrillas, and presented the bodies as those of persons killed in battle to inflate body counts, to make it appear that the military was winning the internal war, and perhaps to receive personal rewards. The “body count” statistics in the Colombian military records were wrong. (http://colombiareports.com/false-positives/).
Another trustworthiness question arises when a person argues that a record about him or her is not accurate or is misinterpreted by the public. Ali Bongo, the president of Gabon, is arguing that his birth certificate is not accurate. Lech Walesa insists that the recently-released file on him does not prove that he collaborated with the Communist-era secret police in Poland. And so on.
Archivists routinely provide certified true copies of records in their holdings. They always caution requesters that a true copy does not mean that the information in the item is true. As we move further into the era when electronic manipulation of documents is routine, insisting that a true copy is just that—the truth is the copy not the information—will be harder but more important to reaffirm, particularly when the document can be used for human rights purposes. Unfortunately, we don’t have a magic fountain in archives.
March: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and draft Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists in Support of Human Rights
The vote was unanimous: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. Eight states of the new United Nations abstained that December day in 1948, but no one said no. After the ghastly years of World War II, support for human rights was universal.
The problem was that the Declaration was just a declaration: it had no enforcement mechanism. So shortly after the Declaration was adopted, the United Nations decided to give it the “hard legal form of an international treaty,” as the eminent German jurist Christian Tomuschat explained. (http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/iccpr/iccpr_e.pdf) To that end two covenants, one on civil and political rights and one on social and economic rights, were developed and opened for signature in December 1966.
Today the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) has 168 state parties. Almost every state of members of the International Council on Archives is a signatory. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has slightly fewer parties—164—but again these include the great majority of member states of the ICA. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-4&chapter=4&lang=en; https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-3&chapter=4&lang=en; http://indicators.ohchr.org/
While all the Articles of both Covenants have strong archival implications, just as each Article of the Declaration does (see discussions in HRWG News, December 2009 through July 2012), Article 19 of the ICCPR has special importance for archivists. In its entirety, it reads:
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
Archivists are people who “receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” As item 3 says, managing this right “carries with it special duties and responsibilities.” There may be “certain restrictions” when receiving and imparting information, and archivists are well aware of the difficulties we sometimes have when confronted with rights-based questions.
To support archivists handling these issues, the Human Rights Working Group proposes the adoption by the International Council on Archives of the “Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists in Support of Human Rights.” For those of us who live in countries that are parties to either or both Covenants, the “Basic Principles” do not introduce any new responsibility for archivists, but they make us aware of responsibilities we already have. The “Basic Principles” are, in fact, a restatement in archival terms of the duties that archivists bear and the rights we have, deriving from the Covenants and other human rights treaties. For those of us who live in countries that are not parties to these Covenants, the “Basic Principles” can be considered ethical guidelines, which complement our ICA Code of Ethics and are a logical consequence of the Universal Declaration on Archives, adopted by ICA and endorsed by UNESCO. And for all of us, they are a useful tool, reminding us of our role in supporting the world community of rights.
April: Privacy, access, technology
I know the names of three people who had leprosy in 1970. Should I? Probably not. I came across the names as I was browsing through a body of records that had been digitized and put on line by a library. The people named may or may not be alive, but their descendants could easily be living, and given the stigma that leprosy still has, they probably would not be happy to know that a perfect stranger in a different country knows that. It would be even more problematic, and probably deeply distressing, if someone they know—say, a school classmate—found that information.
How did this happen? Apparently the library had the documents on microfilm, and with the permission of the country from which the microfilm was obtained, the library digitized the film. I assume that the film was freely available in the past to anyone who came to the library, a policy that privileged those who lived near the library or had the money to travel to it. But it did not protect the sensitive information: only making a decision not to provide access to the film could do that.
The original error with the records of the lepers was to film the information and make it available. Once a page is on microfilm, it is difficult to withhold it from a user without either withholding the entire roll of film or splicing out the image to be withheld. (I remember an exasperated archivist demanding, “What am I supposed to do—stand behind the researcher and pull the plug when he gets to the closed page?”) It is different with digital materials, as we all know. Withholding a digitized item is simply a matter of replacing the image with a digital withholding notice. But that means the library or archives should review the digitized images and make access decisions before popping the images on line.
What about the argument that once an item is disclosed it should continue to be disclosed? As Google found out, the European judiciary certainly doesn’t believe that (for a thoughtful reflection on the issue, see Antoon De Baets’ article, “A Historian’s View on the Right to Be Forgotten,” cited below). If archivists in the past made an error in making items available that negatively affect the human rights of living person, including the right to privacy, that needs to be corrected. There is no shame in admitting an access error, but bringing shame on others through the release of archives is.
May: Criminal court records
Coupable. Culpable. Guilty. Courts in May used those words in a series of high profile cases watched around the world.
At the Extraordinary African Chambers in Dakar, Senegal, Hissene Habre, the former dictator of Chad, was found guilty of crimes against humanity, summary execution, torture and rape and sentenced to life in prison. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/30/chad-hissene-habre-guilty-crimes-against-humanity-senegal At the controversial International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, Bangladesh, five men were found guilty of crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971. Four were sentenced to death and one to life in prison; all have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.
http://www.ict-bd.org/ict1/Judgment%20part%202/ICT%2001%20of%202015%20(Judgment).pdf And in a landmark trial in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after three years of proceedings, 14 former military officers (13 from Argentina and one from Uruguay) were convicted of kidnappings, torture and killings during Operation Condor, a South American state conspiracy to kill opponents during the era of military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. All were sentenced to prison terms; two other defendants were found not guilty, and one defendant was convicted on “charges separate from the larger case,” according to the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/world/americas/argentine-court-confirms-a-deadly-legacy-of-dictatorships.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
Now what happens to the records of these historically significant trials? The Argentina situation is surely the easiest. Argentina has an old, well-established archives system, with an archives for the court, a departmental archives for the justice ministry, and a general national archives. Because the trial was conducted under the regular procedures of Argentina, the records of the trial should follow the regular pattern for the records of the court and the prosecutors and investigators, even though the sheer size of the records will surely strain the existing arrangements.
Bangladesh is more complicated. The Tribunal is established as a unique institution separate from the state court system, with a three-member judicial panel, its own prosecution team, Investigation Agency, and registry. Appeals can be made to the supreme court. Bangladesh does not have an archives law (the national archives is established by regulation), so it is not clear whether the records of the proceedings in front of the Tribunal or the records of the prosecution, investigation, and registry fall within its competency. If not, it is also not clear whether the body responsible for preserving regular court proceedings is prepared to take on the task. And there is a further complication: the violently unsettled state of Bangladesh’s political environment and the great controversy surrounding the Tribunal’s proceedings put the preservation of the records at risk, both of future disappearance or of future selective and biased use.
The Extraordinary African Chambers were established by the African Union, an intergovernmental organization, “within the courts of the Republic of Senegal,” one of its member states. It had an investigative chamber, an indicting chamber, a trial chamber, and an appeals chamber, the latter three all related to the Dakar Court of Appeals. In addition, there was the office of the prosecutor (which seems to contain the investigators as well), a registry, and an administrator whose tasks included public outreach. Unusually, the Chambers also was to manage a trust fund for victims. The proceedings were “filmed and recorded,” and at the end of the trial, according to Article 37, paragraph 2 of the Statute creating the Chambers, “Once the Extraordinary African Chambers have been dissolved, all records and case files shall be archived with the Registry of the Court of Appeal of Dakar.” Senegal has a long archival tradition and a respected archives school located in Dakar. Still, the great variety of records--paper, audiovisual and electronic, from prosecutors and investigators as well as witness protection and the trust fund for victims--is far beyond what a usual court registry would handle. Furthermore, the records will be far from the people of Chad, to whose historical legacy they pertain.
So yes, the month of May saw important results in important cases relating to human rights. These cases created huge archival legacies, important to the countries involved but also to the history of our world. Preserving and protecting them must be a priority for the international community and the nations involved. How will we respond?
June: Guest commentary by Giulia Barrera
July: Records of World War II slow to be released
As the lived memory of World War II ends (you have to be over 70 years old today to remember it), a remarkable number of records and personal items from that era are emerging from the dark.
*Four years ago, when renovating the garage at the dacha that was once owned by Ivan A. Serov, who headed the Soviet KGB from 1954 to 1958, and is now owned by his granddaughter, workers found inside the walls “a few hidden suitcases,” reported the New York Times. The suitcases contained diaries written by Serov, and in June they were published (in a condensed version) in Russia. In the diary Serov wrote that he read a file on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who disappeared in Budapest at the end of World War II after saving Jews by giving them Swedish protection, and concluded, “I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947.” Wallenberg’s family has long asked the Soviets and then the Russians for information on Wallenberg’s fate, and his niece said on her website that she would like to “see the original diaries and ask the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., for documents mentioned by Serov.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/world/europe/from-a-dacha-wall-a-clue-to-raoul-wallenbergs-cold-war-fate.html?_r=0
*The daily schedules of Heinrich Himmler covering the years 1938, 1943, and 1944 “surfaced” “earlier this year” in the Russian Military Archive in Podolsk “filed under Dnewnik – Russian for diary,” reported MailOnline. Himmler was the Reichsführer of the SS, the Nazi agency most directly responsible for the program of genocide. The 1000 pages of annotated entries record “dates, places, meetings and his decision to send millions of people to their deaths.” Extracts of the schedules (called “diaries” by the press) were published in the German newspaper Bild in early August. http://www.bild.de/bild-plus/storytelling/topics/storytelling/wie-bild-den-kriegskalender-von-heinrich-himmler-entdeckte-44878926,var=a,view=conversionToLogin.bild.html; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/himmlers-diaries-reveal-schedule-of-massages-and-mass-murder/
*In 2008 Bild announced that it had obtained the blueprints (28 documents) for the Auschwitz concentration camp where over a million people were killed. Bild did not make clear how it obtained the documents, saying only it “found the plans around a year ago in Berlin, and they are the only original architect designs.” One of the pages of the blueprints was signed by Heinrich Himmler, The Telegraph reported, and “Markings on the backs of the papers suggest they may have been held by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who may have been interested in using them to blackmail German citizens who had been involved with the Nazis during the war.” Kai Diekmann, the publisher of Bild, explained to Spitz in July 2016 that he had suggested giving the blueprints to Yad Vashem, but archivists at the Bundesarchiv told him “firmly not to let the documents leave the country . . Because the German government is the legal successor of the Nazi regime, the documents belonged to the German state.” But, he told the paper, “I still believed they should go to Yad Vashem,” and so he invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Berlin in 2009 and gave him the documents to take out of Germany. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/06/benjamin-netanyahu-given-auschwitz-blueprints-to-smuggle-out-of/; http://www.bild.de/news/bild-english/benjamin-netanyahu-given-auschwitz-plans-at-bild-9542884.bild.html
*In 2013 an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and an investigator from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation located the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the chief Nazi Party ideologues and the head of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which directed the looting of art and cultural goods during World War II. The diary had been used during the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, then with the permission of the director of the U.S. prosecutor’s records, one of the U.S. prosecutors took the diary home with him to use when writing about the trial. He never returned it to U.S. government custody. After years of searching for it, it was located and, according to a book on the case published in the spring of 2016, “the National Archives—which technically owned the diary—officially granted the pages” to the U.S. Holocaust Museum on December 17, 2013. https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/the-alfred-rosenberg-diary; https://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/curators-corner/an-over-15-year-journey-the-robert-m.-w.-kempner-collection; http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/books/tracking-an-elusive-diary-from-hitlers-inner-circle.html?_r=0
Although at first glance these all look like similar cases, each one shows a different set of circumstances. The Serov diaries seem to have always been personal property. The Himmler “diaries” were official schedules typed before each day by Himmler’s aides and were German official records, then were taken to Moscow as part of the documents seized after the war by the Red Army. The Auschwitz plans were declared by the German archivists to be official records, but they were taken out of Germany by the action of a private citizen. The Rosenberg diary was private property seized by the U.S. Army at the end of World War II, used in the Nuremberg trials by the U.S. prosecutor which made it a part of the official record of the U.S. participation, a private person was authorized to take it away, and it was out of official custody for decades until returned to the U.S. government.
In each instance, the items have a direct link to the massive human rights violations that occurred during World War II. In each case, they need to be carefully preserved in an archives, which is now true of all but the Serov diary. And they need to be made available for study in order to help us all fully understand the horrific events that shaped the middle of the twentieth century and the world born from that tumult.
August: 2016 ICA Congress, Basic Principles endorsed as working document
The auditoriums in modern convention centers look pretty much the same: blond wood, soft chairs, huge screen on the stage, translation booths. The program of the opening session of an international congress is pretty much the same, too: welcome from the host country, opening remarks by the president and distinguished participants, and a cultural presentation by the host country. All that happened at the 2016 Congress of the International Council on Archives (ICA) just concluded in Seoul, South Korea. But there was a significant difference, too. Each of the three sets of remarks—by ICA president David Fricker, by UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information Frank La Rue, and the message to the Congress by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon--noted the importance of archives in support of human rights. Sitting in the audience, one could feel the ICA worldview begin to shift. It was an extraordinary moment.
The Congress included many fine program sessions that related to archives and human rights, encompassing such topics as records of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II Nazi collaborators in Belgium, the truth commission in Canada and the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda, to name only a few. And at the close, the national archivist of Mexico, Mercedes de Vega, announced that one of the emphases of the 2017 annual meeting to be held in Mexico City will be archives and human rights.
The day before the Congress opened, the ICA Programme Commission, the body responsible for ICA’s technical and professional program, unanimously endorsed the “Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in Support of Human Rights” as a “working document for circulation within ICA for discussion, publicity and use.” The ICA’s Section on Literary and Artistic Archives quickly posted the “Basic Principles” in English, French and Spanish on its blog: https://literaryartisticarchives-ica.org/2016/09/07/basic-principles-in-support-of-human-rights/ Now all constituent bodies of ICA as well as professional associations of archivists and human rights advocates have the opportunity to discuss, comment on, and endorse the document. From the initial discussions in 2011 on a possible statement on archives and human rights to September 2016 has been a long journey, but the “Basic Principles” statement is finally released.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2018, the international archival community has in the “Basic Principles” a document it can discuss and debate, in the full light of the Declaration and of the difficult history of those seven decades. In 1962 the U.S. novelist and social critic James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The archival profession now has clearly faced its role in support of human rights. How we archivists manage our practices and change them if we need to do so is up to us. The “Basic Principles” is a promissory note from the archival profession.
September: Safe havens for archives at risk
Behind the soaring, sinuous façade of the Paul Klee Center in Bern, Switzerland, a group of archivists and activists from more than a dozen countries plus representatives from UNESCO and the International Council on Archives met on October 6 and 7 to discuss safe havens for archives at risk. Hosted by swisspeace, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Swiss Federal Archives, the goal of the meeting was to convene sending and receiving institutions “to jointly discuss the needs, challenges, good practice and the way forward of safe havens for archives at risk.” After discussing what issues need to be addressed, how to address them and how to design an ongoing process to work on them, the group came to a series of conclusions and decided on a way forward.
A working group was formed to draft further documents to be discussed at a follow-up meeting in 2017. Among the possible drafting projects for the working group are a typology of archives at risk, a check-list for the process of negotiating an agreement on safe haven and a possible model agreement, a set of general criteria for determining the trustworthiness of a receiving institution, a roster of institutions willing to host archives at risk, and a consideration of procedures that could be in place for rapid response in crisis situations.
A full report of the meeting will be forthcoming from swisspeace.
October: Ballots, boxes, and election records
In 2004 six big metal trunks were taking up floor space in the Department of Political Affairs in the United Nations building in New York. They held ballots from the 1999 vote (a “popular consultation”) in East Timor when the population, 98% of whom voted, decisively rejected a proposal to make East Timor a special autonomous region within Indonesia. Instead, the Timorese said by their vote, they wanted national independence. The United Nations had managed the vote, and the Department had decided to hold onto the ballots in case questions arose about the result.
This election season is rife with challenges to the outcomes of votes. Some questions arise over who is listed on the register of eligible voters. As reported in HRWG News 2016-09, a nongovernmental organization in Moldova compared the published electoral rolls for the October 30 presidential election against burials at two cemeteries in Chisinau, the capitol. The check of “more than 300 gravesites found nearly 100 of them contained people on the approved list of voters.” In October in Montenegro, the international election observation mission of the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe termed the parliamentary elections generally fair, but noted that a number of mission members “expressed continuing concerns about the accuracy of the electoral register” which is “maintained by the Ministry of Interior based on information extracted from three civil registers.” http://www.oscepa.org/documents/all-documents/election-observation/election-observation-statements/montenegro/statements-17/3419-2016-parliamentary-3/file
And there are questions about the counting of ballots. In Bosnia, the October 2 vote for the mayor of Srebrenica was contested, and the bags of ballots were brought from the polling stations to a warehouse in East Sarajevo for “a closely observed” recount (BIRN published a picture of the bags arriving). http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/srebrenica-recount-begins-as-bosniak-party-seeks-annulment-10-11-2016?utm_source=Balkan+Transitional+Justice+Daily+Newsletter+-+NEW&utm_campaign=b5804e1df1-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a1d9e93e97-b5804e1df1-319755321
In Gabon in late August the incumbent won a “narrow victory” which the opposition disputed. The loser called for the voting figures from each polling station to be made public, reported the BBC, and appealed to the Constitutional Court, which in late September upheld the original outcome. The Court said “it had retallied all the votes from the poll, though it could not do a full recount because all the votes were burned immediately after they were counted at the polling stations.” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37236253; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/24/gabon-court-rules-president-ali-bongo-rightful-winner-of-september-election
Many records must be reliable for the outcome of an election to be accepted by the populace: registers of voters are the first; next are the ballots themselves, paper or electronic, marked manually or mechanically; then the tallies of the votes, in the polling stations and in the entity as a whole, along with the certified record of the final count and its official announcement. How many of these records have a permanent value and need to be preserved in an archives is a decision that each political entity and its archivists must make. Clearly trunks and bags of ballots are voluminous and, after the election is truly over, may not be needed, even for historical research. But the polling station data can be remarkably useful in understanding the results of elections, particularly when the result is a surprise. The data from the vote in Colombia on October 2, which rejected the peace agreement the government had negotiated with the guerillas, is being analyzed to help understand how a revision of the agreement would gain more popular acceptance. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/voting_for_peace_wwc-fip_final_english.pdf
Preserving the voting record is an essential function for state archives. It is especially crucial when the election is controversial and occurs amid high civic tension. Although most voters don’t know it, when they use a pencil to mark a ballot or pull a lever or tap an electronic voting screen, they are creating a record. They are adding to archives.
November: Records of the missing
Losing a loved one is painful at any time, but holidays often bring special sadness. On Christmas Eve in Finland families go to the cemetery and scoop a bit of snow from the front of gravestones and put lighted candles there. The entire cemetery glows with remembrance of loss and an honoring of past lives. It is a lovely tradition, but one that is not available to too many families in other parts of the world where brothers and sisters and fathers and cousins remain missing.
“The missing” features in many human rights discussions, but the term is often imprecise because there are so many sorts of missing. (We can usually eliminate from the conversation those who choose to be missing, from the person evading arrest to the person cutting ties with family.) There are the violently missing but known or presumed to be alive, such as the Chibok girls captured by Boko Haram or the Colombians who were captured by non-state actors and held for ransom. There are those whose fate is known—that is, that they are dead—but whose bodies have not been recovered, such as the 16 Serbian citizens of Bosniak ethnicity from the town of Sjeverin who were kidnapped and killed in 1992 by members of Bosnian Serb forces during the Balkan war (http://www.hlc-rdc.org/?p=32816&lang=de) or the mass-buried dead of World War I or the pilots shot down in combat or the boats sunk, with the remains now at the bottom of the sea. There are those whose fate is suspected but not definitively known, such as the 43 students who vanished in Iguala, Mexico, in 2014. This autumn Sweden finally declared Raoul Wallenberg dead after the family, having waited seventy-one years, gave up on obtaining confirmation of his fate. (http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/europe/raoul-wallenberg-holocaust-hero-declared-dead/index.html). And there are those whose fate is simply unknown: the three-year-old girl seized by ISIS whose family’s vigil was profiled in a poignant article by Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-mosul-child-idUSKBN13P18G ) or the Argentine babies seized at birth and their mothers killed, the infants adopted without the knowledge of the mother’s family and the grandchildren now sought by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
How can archives help resolve the fates of these missing persons, if not locate their remains? If state actors were involved, we have a great variety of possible archival sources to provide clues or definitive information about the missing, from police and military and intelligence service records to hospital and morgue and cemetery archives. Non-state actors, such as the Islamic State, are known to create documents on at least some captures and transfers of females among fighters, and some of this documentation is being captured (see IS below); in the near future the FARC in Colombia presumably will provide access to some of its documentation. And now archives are beginning to preserve records of DNA samples from relatives of the missing. The International Committee of the Red Cross has in its archives DNA samples from the families of the missing in Chile and will begin to preserve the same from Lebanon. Protecting the samples and—most importantly—the identity of the donors and the analyses of the samples is a solemn responsibility.
So as we approach the end of the calendar year, with its many cherished traditions, by all means light a candle for your loved ones. And then also light one for those whose fate is still unknown and their aching families.
December: 2016 in review
As we start a new year and look back on the tumult of the one just past, a number of organizations have issued lists of good things that happened in 2016. At the Human Rights Working Group we may not have a list of 99 good things, as does this website (https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-reasons-why-2016-has-been-a-great-year-for-humanity-8420debc2823#.z3h69ha97) but we are deeply pleased that the working paper “Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in Support of Human Rights” is now issued and available in a number of languages on the ICA website. And as a final glance at 2016, here are items from each month’s issue of HRWG News that, taken together, illustrate the diversity of human rights issues that include archives. Best wishes for the year ahead!
January. A doctor in Flint, Michigan, United States, discovered that the percentage of children with unsafe levels of lead in their blood doubled and sometimes nearly tripled after the city switched its water source in April 2014. She said, “If we did not have (electronic medical records), if we were still on paper, it would have taken forever to get these results.”
February. Between 1966 and 1996 France carried out nuclear tests in French Polynesia. In 2010 France passed a law authorizing compensation for military veterans and civilians whose cancers could be attributed to the test program, but only around 20 of the 1000 people who applied have received compensation. French President Hollande promised to “review” the processing of the applications.
March. Afghan females who are accused of the crime of sex outside marriage, which is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, are forced to undergo a “virginity exam.” The doctors who perform the exams “write reports based on these examinations, and they are used as evidence in courts hearing the ‘moral crime’ accusation.” Human Rights Watch called it “sexual assault in the name of science.”
April. The United Nations gave Cyprus access to the archives of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus to help locate persons still missing from the Cypriot civil war.
May. Saudi Arabia’s justice ministry issued a “directorate” to clerics who register marriage contracts, telling them they must give the bride a copy of the marriage contract “to ensure her awareness of her rights and the terms of the contract.”
June. Berta Caceres, an environmental activist in Honduras, was murdered. A former Honduran soldier said “lists featuring the names and photographs of dozens of social and environmental activists were given to two elite [military] units, with orders to eliminate each target,” and Caceres’ name was on the list.
July. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began collecting DNA samples in Lebanon to help identify thousands of people who disappeared during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. The ICRC had previously launched a database project in Lebanon to preserve information about each missing person.
August. In 1993 “indigenous and farmer residents of the Ecuadorian rainforest” sued the oil company Texaco, alleging that the company left behind “an environmental and public health disaster” from its oil venture in the Amazon between 1972 and 1990. After winning the case in Ecuador, they tried to collect in the U.S., where Texaco’s successor Chevron is based. The U.S. Second Circuit Court told the Ecuadorians they cannot collect the verdict against Chevron. The Ecuadorians have asked the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into the Texaco/Chevron actions.
September. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a “Policy Paper on Case Selection and Prioritisation” that for the first time indicates that the ICC will prosecute economic and environmental crimes. The Paper also said the Court “will also pay particular attention to attacks against cultural, religious, historical and other protected objects as well as against humanitarian and peacekeeping personnel.”
October. The Central Information Commission of Indonesia ruled “that an investigative report of the murder of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib was public information that needed to be disclosed,” but the government said it did not have the report and did not know its whereabouts.
November. To identify the destruction of three villages in northern Rakhine state, Myanmar, where serious human rights abuses are believed to be occurring, Human Rights Watch (HRW) used high-resolution satellite imagery and also, perhaps for the first time, used thermal anomaly data collected by an environmental satellite sensor that detected the presence of multiple fires burning.
December. A U.S. judge ordered the preservation of the U.S. Senate’s 2014 report on Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.