Archival commentaries 2019
January: Documentation for the disappeared
“We went to the hardware store. My father and I waited in the pickup while my husband went in. He never came out.” That was all the Guatemalan woman said to me, simply, without explaining what happened next, but we can guess: the increasing concern, the decision to go into the store and find him, the questioning of the clerk, the panic, the decision to go home not to the police, the calls to family and friends, the wait to see if there is a ransom demand, the deadening realization that he is not coming back, the juggling of finances to cover needs, the heart-rending decision to ask that he be declared dead so that life can go on.
Resolving disappearances is crucial to the health of any society and the stability of its government. And yet, as the attorney general of El Salvador admitted (see below), although disappearances in the country had increased by 10% in 2018 to 3,514 cases, El Salvador still has “no institutionally agreed methodology to count disappearances.” To begin to fill this methodology need, the United Nations Committee on Forced Disappearances drafted “Guiding Principles for the Search for Disappeared Persons,” now under revision. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CED/Pages/SearchDisappearedPersons.aspx
Records are a critical resource in the search for the disappeared. The revised Guiding Principles should insist that the records of each investigation must be managed competently from the start of the investigation to the disposition of the records when a case is closed. This is particularly important if the investigating authority is a temporary body rather than a regular part of the government or if it is faced with thousands of cases. The investigating authority should have a robust records management system both to handle the evidence it obtains on a case and to provide evidence of the work done by the authority with regard to the search. The authority should have a records schedule that states clearly what will happen to the records when a case is closed (whether by return of the disappeared person, retrieval of remains, or administrative procedure) and states which archives will receive the records of the authority, including both administrative and case-related records. The public, both persons who are searching for disappeared relatives and those who want to know how the authority carried out its mandate, has a right to know what will happen to the records.
The Guiding Principles must apply to the records of both government and non-government entities. The Principles should acknowledge that business records often contain information needed for resolving human rights cases. Three recent examples:
*In December 2018 a court in Argentina convicted two former executives of a local Ford Motor Company plant of involvement in the 1976 kidnapping and torture of 24 workers employed by Ford at their factory on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Among their acts, the men were accused of providing photographs, home addresses and other personal data of the victims to agents of the dictatorship so they could be abducted.
*Also in December 2018, a Brazilian appeals court upheld the 2015 ruling against the Swiss agribusiness company Syngenta for the 2007 murder by Syngenta’s contract security firm of a member of a rural workers group that was protesting at Syngenta’s genetically modified food experiment site.
*After Colombia in August 2018 charged 13 former executives of United Fruit (Chiquita) company with using death squads to kill persons interfering with the work of its plantations, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, DC, published profiles of the 13 men “drawing on available public sources and a 48,000 page trove of the company’s internal records gained through [a] successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.”
We all wish there would be no need for the Guiding Principles, that no one would go into a hardware store and never come out. But until that wished-for day arrives, we need a good protocol for handling cases of the disappeared. No attorney general ever again should say, “We have no methodology to count disappearances.”
February: A Road Paved with Records
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
“The Road Not Taken”
Robert Frost (U.S. poet), 1915
During the past decade young men and women from all over the world took the road to ISIS in the Middle East. Most were Muslim, some were not; most were men, some were women; some went to Syria, some went to Iraq and other countries with ISIS affiliates. After arriving in Syria, some burned their passports.
Now that the ISIS jihadist group is cornered in Syria, some members, captives, and people swept up in the group’s territory are fleeing and surrendering. Held in various jails and detention centers, they include children born while their mothers were with ISIS. Some detainees want to return to their native lands where their parents are anxious to see their children and grandchildren. The return, however, is controversial in the home countries, whose officials worry that these ISIS adherents may not have renounced extremism and will be a danger to national security.
In late 2017 Iraq and Russia announced they were setting up a joint database listing Russian-speaking children “whose parents are believed to have been killed while fighting in Islamic State group ranks” and who are in “government-run children’s homes in Baghdad” in order to return them to relatives in Russia. Russia estimated there are “around 500 children” from “Russian origin or from former Soviet Union countries” in these homes. When the Iraqi government receives official documents from the Russian Embassy in Baghdad “proving that those children are from a Russian origin” the Iraqi Higher Judicial Council decides whether the child should be sent to Russia and the Immigration Department “stamps the passport.” How many of these children have been transported has not been reported. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Iraqi-Ambassador-to-Russia-on-Bringing-Them-Home-Campaign-20170923-0013.html?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=36
Unlike that situation, today’s potential returnees are adults and sometimes adults with children. According to the Washington Post, France is considering bringing home more than 100 former Islamic State fighters, with their families, while Belgium’s government is fighting a judge’s order to “repatriate six Belgian children along with their mothers, former Islamic State sympathizers who twice travelled to Syria.” https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/shamima-begum-19-who-joined-isis-to-lose-uk-citizenship-1996814 It is relatively easy for a government to determine whether a person was issued a passport, and in most countries there are birth registrations and school records and social services and census data that show citizenship. But two examples show the complications that may arise when a government considers a return.
* Shamima Begum, born in the U.K. to Bangladeshi parents who are naturalized citizens, ran away from her home in 2015 to join ISIS. She wants to come back. In the U.K. it is only possible to strip someone of U.K. nationality if they are eligible for citizenship elsewhere “and it is thought Ms Begum could be a Bangladeshi citizen because she was born to a mother believed to be Bangladeshi,” reported BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47310206. Consequently, the U.K. Home Office sent a letter to her parents, saying she was stripped of U.K. citizenship and barred from return. An immigration lawyer told the Washington Post that children of Bangladeshi parents are automatically citizens at birth but this ends at age 21 “if they do not make an effort to retain that citizenship.” https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/shamima-begum-19-who-joined-isis-to-lose-uk-citizenship-1996814 Shamima has not done so; unless she acts, in two years she could be stateless. The nationality of her infant son, whose father is Dutch, is also in question. The Guardian reported that the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service said “to live in the Netherlands with a Dutch national, a spouse or partner would need a resident permit – which would require a valid passport or other travel document,” neither of which she has. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/03/shamima-begum-dutch-husband-wants-to-take-teenager-to-netherlands
*If that case is not complicated enough, look at the case of Hoda Muthana. She was born in the U.S. on 28 October 1994 to Yemeni parents. Her father was a Yemeni diplomat at the United Nations, and he “surrendered his diplomatic identity” either in June 1994 before his daughter was born, making her a birthright U.S. citizen, or in February 1995, which would make her a Yemeni. After Hoda’s birth both parents got residence “green cards” and stayed in the U.S. Hoda got a U.S. passport in 2004 and a renewal in 2014, just before she went to Syria and joined ISIS where she publicly burned her passport. She now wishes to return. The U.S. government revoked her passport in January 2016 saying it had been issued in error: she was not a birthright citizen because “the US Mission to the UN’s records showed that Muthana’s father didn’t lose diplomatic status until months after Hoda was born.” A further complication: she has a small son whose father is Tunisian; it is not clear where her son is a citizen. https://www.vox.com/world/2019/2/22/18236309/hoda-muthana-isis-citizen-trump-pompeo
Passports, birth records, green cards, naturalization records, border control records, video evidence of actions on behalf of ISIS: whichever path is chosen, it is paved with documents. And that makes all the difference.
March: Summer is coming–-and so is climate change
“Sumer is Icumen in,” sang 13th century Brits. Today both summer and climate change are “icumen in.” The UN Secretary-General, alarmed by the World Meteorological Organization’s report on “rising global temperatures and disastrous consequences,” announced a Climate Action Summit to be held in New York on 23 September. He told Heads of State, “Don’t come with a speech, come with a plan.” https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sumer-is-icumen-in; http://www.eurasiareview.com/31032019-un-chief-calls-for-urgent-action-to-address-dangers-linked-to-climate-change-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29; for report see https://gallery.mailchimp.com/daf3c1527c528609c379f3c08/files/82234023-0318-408a-9905-5f84bbb04eee/Climate_Statement_2018.pdf
The Observer Research Foundation, an Indian nongovernmental “think tank,” analyzed the world’s “capacity for climate justice.” Pointing to “extreme weather events and rising average temperatures,” it said “the socio-economic effects of climate change include the potential mass migration of individuals and communities in the future.” Coastal communities in the U.S. and Bangladesh have already been forced to move (see item in HRWG News 2019-01); nations like the Maldives, with an average elevation of just a meter and a half above sea level, are in danger of needing to move entire populations if the international community continues its “lackluster global effort to curb human-induced climate change.” http://www.eurasiareview.com/14032019-capacity-for-climate-justice-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29
When people and institutions (commercial, faith-based, educational, medical, non-governmental, governmental, inter-governmental) move, records need to move with them. Archives buildings housing historical records may be located in vulnerable sites and need to be moved. And moving things is hard. Good advance planning is fundamental if the records are to be safely relocated. (For a brief overview of the complexities of preserving records during a planned move, see “Moving Archival Records: Guidelines for Preservation” by Gabriella Albrecht-Kunszeri and Maida H. Loescher, Comma, The International Journal on Archives: 2001/3/4.) But planning assumes we know where records are. And ironically, although archivists are the proponents of knowledge about records, often we don’t. A project in the United States to create a map of archives encountered a significant amount of difficulty—and that did not include mapping the locations of records still in the hands of the creators.
What we need now--all over the world but especially in locations under threat from climate change—is to map the location of historical archives and current records and to overlay that map with maps of climate change impacts (for example, the map of sea level change https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level ). That would allow us to identify the materials that need to be either relocated within the nation or, as a last resort, stored (digital copy or analog) in an external safe haven.
Who can do such mapping? National archival institutions, archival associations, universities—in short, any entity with persons who have the skills and time to do it. Donors such as foundations could be tapped for funds. UNESCO should pay a role in promoting the project. And when a regional or national map is completed, stakeholders should gather to decide how to proceed with far-sighted, informed, realistic preservation measures. As the Secretary-General said, we need to stop talking and come together and plan.
April: Crimes that go unpunished
Hold ‘em or fold ‘em? Use it or lose it? In the popular card game poker, hold ‘em [them] means you play with the cards you have and fold ‘em means you throw them down and quit. Use it or lose it is a popular culture phrase, often referring to sexual activity by senior citizens. Both phrases have something to teach us about archives of conflict.
As the wars in Syria, Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan decrease in intensity, demands increase to hold perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity accountable for their actions. Enormous quantities of information have been amassed by official bodies such as the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria and a host of private groups including the Commission for International Justice and Accountability in Syria and Iraq, the Syrian Justice and Accountability Center, the Syrian Observatory, the International Bar Associations’ eyewitness to Atrocities app, and others. There is no dearth of evidence.
Realistically, the International Criminal Court will not handle cases arising from these conflicts; it prosecutes high-level officials and military leaders, not the majority of persons who committed crimes. The courts of local and national governments are too weak or corrupt to be fair. Yet victims want a justice process. https://syriaaccountability.org/updates/2019/04/17/prosecuting-isis-in-northeast-syria/?utm_source=SJAC+Weekly+Update&utm_campaign=e2fc334ad1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_10_02_56_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0a7405c641-e2fc334ad1-90540617
A troubling element is the recent decision by the International Criminal Court on Afghanistan. In November 2017 the ICC Prosecutor asked the judges “for permission to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in the Afghan conflict, including by the U.S. military,” Justiceinfo. net reported. In March 2019 the U.S. Secretary of State announced, “If you’re responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of U.S. personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan you should not assume that you still have, or will get, a visa or that you will [be] permitted to enter the U.S.” In April the visa of the ICC prosecutor was revoked; the ICC judges decided to deny the Prosecutor’s request to open an investigation. A recently departed ICC prosecutor said that “the information about alleged crimes by the CIA was very strong,” and in the wake of the decision “we may see a situation where alleged criminal activity under international law that has been acknowledged by the U.S. government and documented by other courts, government, NGOs and victims go unprosecuted.” https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/live-feed/40582-us-in-first-sanctions-against-icc.html ; https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019/04/05/US-denies-entry-for-ICC-prosecutor-under-new-ban/7091554464008/ ; https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/tribunals/icc/41098-reality-check-for-the-icc-in-afghanistan.html
So the world is accumulating an ever-increasing amount of evidence on crimes that go unpunished, from Sri Lanka to Papua to Rwanda. The list of only UN investigations into serious international crimes is long—Congo, Myanmar, Burundi, South Sudan, etc.--and the records exist; see http://libraryresources.unog.ch/factfinding/chronolist. Add to that the records of the nongovernmental organizations that monitor conflicts and we have persuasive records of atrocities committed. Should we say that because this evidence can’t be used now, we will lose the opportunity to hold accountable (use it or lose it)? Or do we believe that, in the longer term, there may be a path to justice (hold ‘em not fold ‘em)?
We are seeing some evidence that many years later persons can be held accountable. Both Peru and Romania are beginning trials for crimes committed in the 1980s; Argentina recdently completed a trial on events in 1976 (see items below). Sudan’s dictator, long under ICC indictment, is now in jail; whether he will be transferred to The Hague is unclear. Having records of the atrocities committed is essential, perhaps especially for delayed justice. So to archivists who manage records of conflicts and investigations, the advice is: Hold ‘em.
May: “Expect the machines to take control”
Ask a classroom of university students to list the researcher advantages of digital archives, whether digitized or born digital, and you get predictable answers: available without respect to location, time of day, age, physical mobility, or political system--in other words, democratic access. Some savvier students may say it helps preserve papers and photographs because they aren’t handled. A few may complain gently about the thousands of hits they get for a simple query, but most are happy to search without having to develop a search strategy. They fail to note that the actual researcher is a machine.
The broad uses of artificial intelligence (AI) and the increasingly sophisticated algorithms employed raise significant issues for researchers, for human rights and for archives.
Consider this: According to the Daily Mail, the European Union plans to introduce “swarms of AI driven robots that can patrol borders by surveillance of the sea and land.” The robots’ data will be fed to a control room where it will be linked to data from “static sensors.” An algorithm will then identify “threats” to be sent to “border authorities” and “operational personnel.” A leader of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control told the Italian magazine Il Manifesto the group wants “to prevent two functions of the machines: target selection and targeting.” AI systems for facial recognition are known to incorporate bias: according to researchers at two U.S. universities “three commercially released facial-analysis programs from major technology companies demonstrate both skin-type and gender biases.” In tests, “the three programs’ error rates in determining the gender of light-skinned men were never worse than 0.8 percent. For darker-skinned women, however, the error rates ballooned — to more than 20 percent in one case and more than 34 percent in the other two.” So how accurate will the EU robots be in identifying border crossers, smugglers, and polluters, the targets of the EU programs? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7022589/Swarms-automated-drones-controlled-AI-patrol-Europes-borders-using-powerful-sensors.html; http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212
Or think about this records issue: A non-profit organization in California developed an algorithm which “can, at the touch of a button, delete the criminal records of thousands of people,” Digital Journal reported. Called “Clear My Record,” the algorithm examines “thousands of lines of conviction data and determines eligibility [for destruction] within minutes.” The developer says it could “clear 250,000 convictions throughout California by the end of 2019.” Let’s hope the algorithm was taught records retention rules. http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/justice-algorithm-wipes-the-criminal-past-of-thousands/article/548754
Or this structural archives issue: A records management official in a government agency that is installing an artificial intelligence system to manage the agency’s records from retention to retrieval to destruction was asked if the AI system eventually would be transferred to the national archives along with the records. He said he thought that the national archives would never hold AI-powered records, that the records would stay permanently in the agency and be managed by it with the national archives having solely a monitoring role.
Or this freedom of information issue: Is an algorithm employed by a government reachable as a record under a freedom of information act? Italy has a case on point. After a national public exam to hire teachers, the Italian Ministry of Education used an algorithm to assign teachers to schools. A legal battle followed, as teachers unhappy with assignments demanded to know how the algorithm worked. Italy’s highest administrative court decided that the algorithm was an administrative document, created by humans who gave it specific instructions, and therefore was covered by the right of access law. (Thanks to Giulia Barrera for the information.) https://parer.ibc.regione.emilia-romagna.it/notizie/algoritmi-delle-pa-una-sentenza; for the court decision see https://www.giustizia-amministrativa.it/portale/pages/istituzionale/visualizza/?nodeRef=&schema=cds&nrg=201704477&nomeFile=201902270_11.html&subDir=Provvedimenti
Finally, in addition to concerns about bias in targeting as a human rights issue and destruction and retrieval as archives issues, AI adopters are realizing that “training” a major AI system is a massive task. Moreover: As reported in n a new paper, researchers at a U.S. university “performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emission of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).” So in addition to the complex intellectual task of training, there is an environmental impact. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/
The Council of Europe (CoE) has taken a step to address the human rights concerns that arise from the machine as researcher. CoE’s Commissioner for Human Rights issued “Unboxing Artificial Intelligence: 10 Steps to Protect Human Rights.” Step 7, on data protection and privacy, says member states should have legislative safeguards when AI systems are used to process “genetic data; personal data relating to offences, criminal proceedings and convictions, and related security measures; biometric data; personal data relating to ‘racial’ or ethnic origin, political opinions, trade-union membership, religious or other beliefs, health or sexual life.” https://rm.coe.int/unboxing-artificial-intelligence-10-steps-to-protect-human-rights-reco/1680946e64 Now we need to think how those principles will apply to archives.
As long ago as 1951 Alan Turing, the brilliant World War II era British mathematician and computer visionary, wrote in the essay Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory, “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.” http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/intelligent-machinery-a-heretical-theory.pdf
It’s time to take notice.
June: Holes in the Poles and the right to be wrong
They appeared in the doorway, two middle-aged men in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties. Dick, my boss in the office of U.S. Presidential archives, asked how he could help them. “We know,” one said, “that ships from outer space have landed on the White House lawn in every Administration since Taft and you are hiding the records.” No, Dick replied, space ships had not landed on the White House lawn, there are no records of such events, and the archives was not hiding such records from the public. “You lie,” they said. After a little more discussion, the men explained that there are holes at the North and South Poles that lead to sub-tropical paradises where space ships fly in to refuel. That led Dick to suggest that they talk with the archivist who handled the records of polar explorations. They did. That archivist had just participated in an expedition to Antarctica; he told them he had been to the South Pole and there was no hole there. “You lie,” they said.
Many people are concerned about fake information posted to social media (see https://www.journalism.org/2019/06/05/many-americans-say-made-up-news-is-a-critical-problem-that-needs-to-be-fixed and items below in the technology section). But at least as worrying is the trend to believe things that are demonstrably wrong, disbelieving government (space ships did not land on the White House lawn), experience (I was at the South Pole), or professionalism (we did not hide records).
A core human right is the freedom of belief. But does that entail the right to be wrong, to believe an untruth in the face of truth? A representative of the British Red Cross Society said that since the August 2018 outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo its workers have heard “more than 33,000 individual rumours, observations and beliefs related to Ebola,” such as “The Ebola virus doesn’t exist; it’s a virus that was made to eliminate the Congolese.” How, he asked, “do you fight a disease people don’t believe in?” http://news.trust.org/item/20190620142457-zkby8/
The Wellcome Global Monitor polled people in 144 countries on beliefs about vaccines, which again and again have proven effective. It found that in France one in three people think vaccines are unsafe--the highest rate in the world--and nearly one in five believe they aren’t effective. “According to the World Health Organization (WHO), reluctance or refusal to vaccinate is now one of the top ten major threats to global health. One manifestation of this is that even people in high-income countries, with good healthcare systems, are dying from easily preventable diseases.” https://mosaicscience.com/story/how-france-persuading-its-citizens-get-vaccinated-measles-antivax-vaccines-vaccination/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6d5d1a258a-MR_COPY_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-6d5d1a258a-149736437
To be sure, there is an enormous difference between believing in holes in the Poles and believing that Ebola does not exist. The critical test for the right to be wrong must be whether acting on the belief hurts others. Believing in space ships is unlikely to harm anyone, but failure to treat a communicable disease surely can. There are limits to the right to be wrong.
Archivists know that the records we manage contain both truths and untruths, and when we provide a certified true copy of a document we only assure the recipient that it is a true copy, not that the information in the document is true. But we do hold records that are demonstrably true: that a treaty exists, that a person was appointed to a university post, that the efficacy and safety of a vaccine was tested before it was put on the market. And we hold records showing that an action or transaction was based on false information, prejudice, and fear. Our task is to ensure that the original record is protected, knowing that a copy of it can be manipulated in many ways and its information can be believed, disbelieved or ignored. But if you do happen to have a reliable, original image of a subtropical paradise at either Pole, let me know.
July: “As only archivists can do”
“As only archivists can do,” said the prosecutor. The case was in Italy, but it could have been in Guatemala or Bangladesh or anywhere. Here is the story:
In January 2017 a tribunal in Rome sentenced two former heads of state and two ex-chiefs of security forces from Bolivia and Peru, two military officers from Chile, and a former Uruguayan foreign minister to life imprisonment for their involvement in the coordinated, cross-border system of repression known as “Operation Condor.” The case involved the “disappearance” of 42 dual citizens – 33 Italian-Uruguayans, 5 Italian-Argentinians and 4 Italian-Chileans. And although the court convicted the five, it acquitted all other defendants (14), of whom eleven were Uruguayan.
During that trial Giulia Barrera, senior archivist at the national archives of Italy, was an expert witness for the prosecution. At the beginning of the trial, the prosecutor encouraged the court to read at least a few crucial documents regarding the creation of Operation Condor and suggested the court also read the transcript of the testimony of “historian and archivist” Giulia Barrera, who provided tools for understanding the value of such documents “as only archivists can do.” The prosecutor said Dr. Barrera analyzed the documents with “specific technique and made an assessment of the value of sources” so that the documents could be incorporated in the trial with full confidence about their value. The prosecution then presented U.S. declassified documents and documents from the archives of Paraguay, Uruguay and other sources. The court considered these documents crucial evidence of the existence of Operation Condor and of its criminal nature.
The decision in the first trial was appealed, and the Court of Appeal combined it with other related cases, several of which concerned persons who were kidnapped and killed in international illegal repressive operations carried out in the framework of Operation Condor. Archival documents again played a crucial role. During the appeal trial no witness was admitted, but the lawyer for the State of Uruguay was able to present new archival documents that were recently declassified in Uruguay, including the personal military file of Nestor Troccoli, a Uruguayan Navy officer with dual Italo-Uruguayan citizenship who fled Uruguay to escape trial and took refuge in Italy.
On 9 July 2019 the Court of Appeal sentenced all 24 defendants to life imprisonment for the murder of Italian citizens (Italo-Chilean and Italo-Uruguayan) who were “disappeared” in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970s. Only one defendant, Troccoli, was present; the rest were sentenced “in absentia.” Finally, justice.
As only archivists can do, indeed.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2017-01-17/operation-condor-condemned-life; https://www.republica.com.uy/plan-condor-uruguay-da-vuelta-juicio-en-roma-y-logra-prision-perpetua-para-trece-represores-id718206/; https://www.presidencia.gub.uy/comunicacion/comunicacionnoticias/sentencia-tribunal-apelaciones-italia-plan-condor ; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/08/italian-court-jails-24-over-south-american-operation-condor The entire trial was recorded by “Radio Radicale” and is available here https://www.radioradicale.it/processi/1266/processo-dappello-contro-i-responsabili-delloperazione-condor
Note: The June commentary suggested that the “critical test of the right to be wrong must be whether acting on the belief hurts others.” Antoon De Baets wrote to say that the right to be wrong is supported in General Comment 34 on States parties' obligations under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The only legitimate grounds for restricting the right to freedom of expression listed in the ICCPR are (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; and (b) For the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals. Paragraph 49 of the General Comment says, “The Covenant does not permit general prohibition of expressions of an erroneous opinion or an incorrect interpretation of past events.”
August: Before the Water Comes: Mapping for Preservation
After the heart-breaking reports of Hurricane Dorian’s devastation in the Bahamas, I emailed Patrice Williams, the director of the National Archives, and asked, “Are you and your colleagues okay after hurricane Dorian? Did you have damage to the archives?” She replied that both the colleagues and the archives are safe, as they were out of the direct path of the storm. “Whew,” I thought. But we know that a national archives does not hold all important records: business records, archives of faith-based institutions, school records, archives of all sorts of nongovernmental institutions, local notary and land transaction records, personal papers in homes and bank boxes—these are all vulnerable and the damage to them cannot be determined with a quick email.
It is not clear what effect global warming had on the violence of the Category 5 hurricane that was Dorian, but it is unquestionable that climate change is real, with no cessation in sight. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report showed oceans warmer than estimated (see HRWG News 2018-10 and 2019-01); for a recent analysis of the warming world, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-world/. Along with warmer oceans, climate change brings the melt of ice caps and glaciers, leading to sea level rise. As the National Geographic explains, “The most recent special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we can expect the oceans to rise between 10 and 30 inches (26 to 77 centimeters) by 2100 with temperatures warming 1.5 °C. . . . Another analysis based on NASA and European data skewed toward the higher end of that range, predicting a rise of 26 inches (65 centimeters) by the end of this century if the current trajectory continues.” That will mean permanent flooding in thousands of populated areas, not only on the coasts but also along the rivers that lead to the sea. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/
We know that in the wake of disasters people need documents. The foresighted Syrian project called The Day After copied court and land records in Aleppo, Syria, and took copies out of the country to save them from manmade disaster. But people also need records of marriages, education, employment, affiliations, health. And communities need the documents of heritage in order to root themselves in their culture.
Archivists have thought a great deal about coping with disasters, such as floods and hurricanes that result in (usually) temporary displacement. And archivists have given some thought to disaster preparedness, too. But inexorable climate change requires a longer strategy. Archives of all kinds will have to assess the risk, decide how to mitigate that risk, and take action, which may take years to accomplish. Does the archives move? Does it stay in place but send security copies to another location, either in the country or outside? Does it need evacuation plans? Will building changes, like a seawall, be enough?
To begin, archivists must to understand the scope of the changes that are coming. One way to do this is to map. The first step would be to map the locations of the archives in the country or province, including in government offices, major businesses, faith-based organizations, schools, and so forth. No mapping project will find all of them, but it should be able to locate the major ones. Next overlay that map with the best projections of sea level rise, such as in the forthcoming IPCC publication Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (https://www.ipcc.ch/). With that information in hand, a council of stakeholders can assess the nature of the risk and decide on actions that need to be taken to prevent mass loss of archives.
As the world’s climate continues its rapid change, we can be certain that not all archives will be as lucky as the National Archives of the Bahamas was this time. We archivists need to get ready to preserve the records of our civilizations.
September: Who are you? The tattoo solution
In the 18th century Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, suggested that people should tattoo their name, address, and date of birth on their wrists: “Who are you, with whom I have to deal? The answer to this important question would no longer be liable to evasion.” While Mr. Bentham’s suggestion was ignored—and today’s tattoo fashion is far from name and address—the identification of a person is an enduring problem. Documents—passports, identity cards, medical records, driver’s licenses, marriage contracts, birth certificates—many people have one or all of these.
Except when they don’t, or when the documents they have are not trusted by the person who asks, “Who are you?”
For example, in Berlin a man was arrested for killing a former Chechen separatist commander on 23 August. According to the New York Times, he had a Russian passport and, yes, arm tattoos but “investigators believe the name is fake.” An anonymous email to the Berlin police suggested the man is a former major in the St. Petersburg police department named Vladimir Alekseevich Stepanov; the Times found his name in “court and government records in Russia” and “also ran searches through millions of images on numerous photo databases and located two potential photographs of him,” but then Fontanka.ru, a Russian news website, said Mr. Stepanov was in prison and published a “current photo of Mr. Stepanov, which does not seem to resemble the suspect in custody in Berlin.” So who is he? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/world/europe/berlin-murder-russia.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fkatrin-bennhold&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection
For another example, migrants of all ages often have few and sometimes no documents. Human Rights Watch issued a report on the treatment of unaccompanied migrant children in the French Hautes-Alpes. It conducted interviews between January and July with 61 juvenile migrants as well as others who interacted with the children and reviewed the records of evaluations of 36 children by the government, 13 juvenile court judgments, and 2 guardianship offers. The children told them that they “felt they had not been heard” during their interviews with French authorities, “a conclusion reinforced when they saw the reports prepared by the examiner.” HRW found that “many [of the children] are refused formal recognition as children after flawed age assessments” and “police have also harassed aid workers, volunteers, and activists who take part in search-and-rescue operations in the mountains.” Among other recommendations, HRW urges the government to presume that the “birth certificates and other identity documents obtained abroad” that the child has “be presumed valid in the absence of substantiated reason to believe they are not” and to treat the children as the juveniles they are. https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/05/subject-whim/treatment-unaccompanied-migrant-children-french-hautes-alpes
And then there is this: “A new Chinese app that lets users swap their faces with celebrities . . in a video clip racked up millions of downloads,” Reuters reported, but sparked “new concerns surrounding identity verification.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-tech-zao/chinese-face-swapping-app-goes-viral-sparks-privacy-concerns-idUSKCN1VN0G9
Governments hold a monopoly on issuing documents of legal identity, and government archives around the world hold literally billions of examples. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 is “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” It does not say where and how that registration is to be maintained and made available to the person asking, “Who are you?” Tattooing is looking better all the time.
October: Human dignity and the dead in Caesar photographs
On the evening of October 31, I walked into a Hong Kong hotel seeking food and was confronted with a shining white skull—artificial, but startlingly realistic. It was, of course, decoration for Halloween, the night when certain traditions say spirits rise from graves and cavort in the world. From apparently pagan roots, Halloween in various countries has become a festival, a commercial celebration, a costume party, a time to watch horror movies: in other words, fun.
It is a testament to the ability of humans to compartmentalize that when we see a skull on a reception desk we smile but we demand that photographs of the dead are handled with the utmost discretion. Consider the issue of the Caesar photographs. In 2014 a Syrian military police photographer, given the cover name “Caesar,” managed to leave Syria, bringing with him on a computer thumb drive 53,275 images of approximately 11,000 dead bodies of people tortured and killed while in Syrian military detention. He told a three-person Inquiry of eminent jurists that the reasons he was ordered to take the photographs were “[f]irst to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out.” At that time of the Inquiry’s report, the photographs were entrusted to the “Syrian National Movement.” https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1390226674736/syria-report-execution-tort.pdf
On 21 September 2017, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and a number of Syrians called the “Caesar Files Group” filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe against senior officials from the Syrian intelligence services and the military police for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Group gave the Prosecutor “a set of high-resolution images and metadata” that “can be used to verify the photographs and provide further information about them. This adds to the evidentiary value of the images and paves the way for further investigatory steps.” In June 2018, the “German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) issued an international warrant against Jamil Hassan on the basis of the so-called Caesar Files, their metadata as well as witness statements by Syrian torture survivors. Hassan was the head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Service until July 2019 and therefore responsible for torture in thousands of cases.” https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/caesar-photos-document-systematic-torture/
Meanwhile, the nongovernmental Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) obtained “about 6,189 Caesar photographs” and is working to determine the identity of the people photographed (the images have only numbers, not names). So far SNHR has identified 801 persons, including 2 children and 10 adult females. It decided not to publish the photos it has because, it wrote, this “would involve many violations, perhaps the most prominent of which is the violation of victims’ and family members’ privacy . . the publication of such distressing photos may cause further trauma and pain to the tens of thousands of families whose children are still forcibly disappeared. In addition to this, most of these graphic photos of individuals killed under torture contain shocking and distressing scenes and we believe that disseminating them without very good cause is a violation of human dignity.” http://sn4hr.org/blog/2019/10/21/54362/
Atrocity photographs are, unfortunately, increasingly common, from videos of Islamic State murders published on line to images of police brutality captured by cellphone cameras. They are important as potential legal evidence, for resolving the fates of persons, and for the history of the event and the human community. Some of them are public immediately, such as the images broadcast by the gunman who killed two people and injured two more in Halle, Germany (see below). But managing the records of undisclosed atrocity photographs such as those Caesar had requires a sensitive, serious consideration of their impact when made public, the privacy rights of the families of the persons pictured, and the need to show the public the evidence of crimes. Surely if it is possible to bring closure to a family by making the photos available to the family for review while protecting their privacy, that is the just course of action, while denying access to the general public. SNHR and others who hold such archives have a most serious responsibility when they grant access.
November: News at 10!
It began this way: At the 2009 meeting of the International Council on Archives, national archivists were wary of the 6-year-old Human Rights Working Group. They seemed fear that if a body with the ICA’s name pointed to human rights abuses by governments, it would make it difficult for them to continue supporting ICA. As the incoming chair of the HRWG, I took the stage at the annual business meeting and promised that the Group would look at human rights issues in all sectors of society, not just governments. The way I thought to keep my word was to send out regular reports about human rights in international news. I put out the first issue of HRWG News in December 2009 which, as you look at the issue number above, means this issue completes a 10-year run of monthly releases.
That first issue was only two pages in length, and it announced that the next issues of the newsletter would discuss the Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and highlight examples of records essential to exercise those rights; those became commentary topics through July 2012. The next set of commentaries focused on the Principles of Access to Archives, which the ICA adopted at its August 2012 annual meeting. Since that run was completed in June 2013, the commentary has simply focused on a topic in the news. To mark the 10-year anniversary, a list of commentary topics will be posted to the SAHR website. The compilation of the commentaries on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I issued in 2018 for the 70th anniversary of the UDHR, can be found there also.
Early on I began to separate items into sections for international, general, bilateral/multilateral, and national news. Individual country and bilateral items form the most prominent part of the News; over 150 countries have been featured at least once in the 10 years. But increasingly human rights in business and in medical treatment and the related records have assumed greater importance in the coverage. I always include news from international organizations, as that information is often lacking or buried in national news media yet has broad impact.
Deciding how to characterize a news item is difficult. Do you, for example, think an item on how DNA is used in research on criminal cases should be listed under privacy, technology or medical news? Is an item on the war in Yemen part of the general wars in the Middle East or is it separate (right now it is separate)? Early issues had all news about UN Special Rapporteurs under the UN heading, but as I heard from people that they read only the news items on the countries in which they were interested, I started moving UN and other international news that applies only to one country to the country item. The yearly indexes for the News, which I began keeping in 2013, show how shockingly inconsistent I have been. Yearly indexes for 2016-2018 will be posted to the SAHR website.
After a reader told me that some of the summaries were too brief to allow him to decide whether to read the whole story, I started adding more text to some items, adding work for the translators. Coverage changes; for instance, a few years ago I dropped reporting on any but extraordinary data breaches—there were just too many. I try to avoid using links that lead to sites for paying subscribers only; often I can find an open site that carries the same story and I will cite that.
Over the years I have been asked how I put the issue together. I am always grateful for leads to articles, and I thank the tipsters. But mostly it comes from reading: a dozen daily newspapers in paper or on line and several dozen other electronic news sources, some daily, some weekly, some biweekly, some monthly. I always use and am enormously thankful for Peter Kurilecz’s RAINbyte, Documentary Heritage News from Library and Archives Canada, and the monthly Crisis Watch from the International Crisis Group; without them this News would be poorer.
The News has many unseen helpers. Until her untimely death in 2017 Cristina Bianchi translated it into French. Since that time the major work of French translation has been done by Remi Dubuisson and Myriam Erwin. Before 2015 some of the News was translated into Spanish by Roman Lescano; since that time Paloma Beneito Arias, Valentina Rojas and Blanca Bazaco Palacios share that task. A number of people have served as webmaster, getting the News onto the ICA page, including Teresa Fallon, Kate Blalack and, currently, Roman Lescano. Thanks to all of them for this time-consuming, unrecognized but incredibly devoted work.
Distributing the News has been complicated. I post the News to the ICA listserve, but the ICA is unable to maintain a subscription list for non-members. Consequently, UNESCO, through the good offices of Jens Boel, made an important contribution by distributing the issues through 2017 to a mailing list it maintained. Since then, thanks to Giulia Barrera, the National Association of Italian Archives’ online archival magazine Il Mondo degli Archivi has taken over, reformatting and distributing the News to a mailing list it maintains. Thanks to all these people and groups.
And, above all, my thanks to all readers everywhere. May the next ten years find more examples of archives affecting positively the human rights of each of us, anywhere we live and work and have our being.
December: 2019 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.