Archival commentaries 2021
January: The assassination of Lokman Slim
This commentary was going to be about the importance of business records in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic: the manufacture of vaccine and glass vials and packaging, the transport of all those products, the distribution to governmental and commercial stations for inoculation. But then, on the morning of 4 February, I learned that Lokman Slim, a Lebanese activist, thinker, and committed archives advocate, had been assassinated.
The famous question is “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Lokman Slim was a giant redwood, and his fall has made a sound in political, social, and cultural circles from the Middle East to the U.S. Midwest. You can read about him in newspapers from Al Arabiya https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2021/02/04/Who-is-Lokman-Slim-A-profile-on-Lebanese-activist-Hezbollah-critic-shot-to-death to France 24 https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210204-lokman-slim-prominent-hezbollah-critic-shot-dead-in-south-lebanon to the New York Times https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210204-lokman-slim-prominent-hezbollah-critic-shot-dead-in-south-lebanon and more.
Lokman Slim knew two important things about archives: he knew that records have to be preserved and he knew that they must be made accessible. With his wife, Monika Borgmann, he created the institution UMAM Documentation and Research to gather as much information as possible about the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and the persons who were still missing from it. In recent years, he helped many Syrian groups collect important materials on the still raging war in Syria. And he knew that documenting Lebanese culture was important, too: he would take posters off trees on the sidewalk for preservation, he acquired the film footage of a major producer of Lebanese motion pictures and advertising, and he even rescued the records of one of the famous Beirut hotels, commandeering them from a truck on the way to a dump.
As UMAM’s documentation on the missing from the civil war grew to thousands of cases, Lokman Slim realized that it was essential to have a copy of those files located far from the UMAM archives. After securing that safe place in the National Archives of Finland, he became one of the founding members of the group that developed the international Guiding Principles for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk, coordinated by swisspeace and endorsed by the International Council on Archives as official guidance. He served on the Advisory Committee for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk from its inception.
Lokman Slim’s death reminds us all of the danger that human rights activism entails. And for those of you holding sensitive human rights documentation, whether in an archives or in the offices of an advocacy group or your home, make sure your documentation has a safe haven somewhere. That will be a tribute to the tree that just fell in the human rights forest.
February: Archives in danger
The SAHR News commentary in January 2020 described a number of archives and archivists around the world that seemed to be at serious risk of harm, among them in Lebanon, Chile and Guatemala. It is time to look again at these and other situations.
An article in a February 2021 issue of The Economist was headlined “Global democracy has a very bad year” with a subhead “The pandemic caused an unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms in 2020.” The accompanying map shows great swaths of orange and red, designating countries with authoritarian regimes. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/02/global-democracy-has-a-very-bad-year Also in February, Human Rights Watch (HRW) “reviewed national government responses around the world to the Covid-19 pandemic and found that unlawful interference with free speech has been one of the most common forms of overreach,” with at least 83 government using the pandemic to “justify violating the exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.” Journalists, peaceful protesters, opposition activists and lawyers were physically assaulted by “security forces or state officials in a least 18 countries.” And “at least eight governments temporarily suspended or restricted the right to request and receive public health information, or limited press accreditation for Covid-19-related press briefings to pro-state media outlets,” citing Turkey, El Salvador and Bangladesh as among these abusers. HRW’s finding is “based on its own research, as well as outside sources including the Covid-19 Civic Freedom Tracker of the International Center for Not-For-Profit law and European Center for Not-For-Profit Law, reports by other nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations, and international and local media.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/11/covid-19-triggers-wave-free-speech-abuse
So how is this rollback affecting archives and archivists? Readers of the January 2021 issue of SAHR News know the incredibly sad story of the assassination of Lokman Slim, the co-founder of the UMAM Documentation and Research center in Beirut, Lebanon, which has important holdings on the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In Chile, University of Chile archivist Alejandra Araya was the subject of a criminal complaint against her which was dismissed, due to lack of evidence, on 24 November 2020.[1] In Guatemala, the case against the former national archivist, Anna Carla Ericastilla, drags on with no end in sight. In a war-torn African country, an archivist no longer responds to email messages, raising concerns. One bright spot was the protective order issued for the Guatemala police archives (see item below).
As democratic systems crumble or evolve toward an authoritarian system, worry rises about risks to entities such as Sri Lanka’s Office of Missing Persons, which holds documentation on the civil war, and civil society organizations in Myanmar whose existence is under threat. In Nicaragua, a law passed in December “requires people and organizations receiving funds from outside Nicaragua to register as ‘foreign agents’ with the Interior Ministry and provide detailed reports of their income and expenditures to the government or face hefty fines, jail time and seizure of their property,” AP reported. Both PEN-Nicaragua and the press freedom organization Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation said they were closing rather than comply. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4121526 What will happen to all these records?
Backsliding occurs; it is not easy to build or to maintain a democratic system. In 1867 the wise Tunisian reformer Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, viewing European politics, wrote that sometimes a dictator “would be accepted by the people for the purpose of extinguishing [national] helplessness, delivering the kingdom from danger, and making her conditions viable by smoothing out the people’s rough spots and straightening their crookedness. However, the people usually do not get what they hoped for.” (Quoted in Leon Carl Brown, The Surest Path: The Political Treatise of a Nineteenth Century Muslim Statesman, Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 177.)
Straightening crookedness is hard. Documenting it is even harder and more dangerous. As we watch the worldwide evolution of state systems, we must hope that documentation of regimes—so necessary for diagnosing the state—however difficult, will prevail.
March: CORRUPTION!
CORRUPTION! In Italy a corruption case against Royal Dutch Shell, Eni, several of their current and former executives and the former Nigerian Minister of Petroleum ended with their acquittal on corruption charges related to a Nigerian oil deal to secure an offshore oil prospecting license. Global Witness, the NGO which had developed the evidence for the case, urged an appeal. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-17/eni-ceo-descalzi-is-acquitted-in-nigeria-bribery-case; https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/shell-and-eni-verdict-not-final-word-scandal/ Even more troubling, two former employees of Afriland Bank “who exposed the institution’s potential involvement in a suspected global money laundering network,” were tried and given death sentences by a court in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which Global Witness says seem “to have been based on misleading or false information.” The two had “shared a trove of data and documents with the Platform for the Protection of African Whistleblowers (PPLAAF), a nongovernmental organization based in France,” said HRW which, with other NGOs, called for the sentences to be overturned. https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/statement-global-witness-judgement-handed-down-congolese-whistleblowers-koko-lobanga-and-navy-malela-mawani-relation-their-involvement-providing-information-used-investigations-carried-out-pplaaf-and-global-witness/; https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/09/dr-congo-quash-whistleblowers-death-sentences The International Center for Transitional Justice said corruption in Tunisia was due to “mutually reinforcing impunity”: “government officials engaged in corruption were immune to prosecution because they were able to silence those who would denounce them. At the same time, members of the regime engaging in human rights violations were immune to prosecution, because holding them accountable would threaten those profiting from corruption schemes.” https://www.ictj.org/publication/measuring-results-and-monitoring-progress-transitional-justice-processes
Turning to Latin America, in El Salvador the employees’ union of the Legislative Assembly denounced the existence of at least 1,000 ghost jobs in Congress. The Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation and searched the Assembly “gathering more than a thousand documents,” reported International Crisis Watch. https://www.crisisgroup.org/crisiswatch#overview In neighboring Honduras, the President’s sister “routed public funds through shell companies to pay off over 70 journalists, mostly television editors and broadcasters, for favorable coverage of the ruling National Party,” according to Contracorriente. https://contracorriente.red/2021/03/07/vehiculos-sandwiches-y-periodistas-el-desfalco-de-hilda-hernandez/ A new book in Brazil, O Organizacao, tells the history of the Odebrecht case in which the construction company paid bribes in many Latin American countries for decades; the author called it a “tale that illustrates how influence slowly faded into corruption, which then became a central plank in the growing conglomerate’s business model.” https://brazilresearchinitiative.org/the-organization-corruption-and-business/
Corruption is nothing new, of course. It can infect government, business, faith-based organizations, NGOs, but government corruption is particularly pernicious. Aristotle is often quoted as writing in Politics, “to protect the treasury from being defrauded, let all money be issued openly in front of the whole city, and let copies of the accounts be deposited in various wards.” The United Nations Convention against Corruption, which entered into force on 14 December 2005, is the only legally binding universal anti-corruption instrument. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CAC/ 187 nations have now signed it, including all six countries mention in the paragraphs above. In its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2020, released in late January, Transparency International found that “from the perspective of business people and country experts” who were surveyed, more than half of the countries in the world are viewed as having a corrupt public sector. https://images.transparencycdn.org/images/2020_CPI_FAQs_ENv2.pdf This points to the serious lack of enforcement of the Convention.
In his foreword to the Convention, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote, “Corruption is an insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects on societies. It undermines democracy and the rule of law, leads to violations of human rights, distorts markets, erodes the quality of life and allows organized crime, terrorism and other threats to human security to flourish.” Human rights is front and center in the need to combat corruption. And so are records. National courts prosecuting corruption rely on business and government records; for example, the massive research undertaken in Guatemala by CICIG, an international commission against impunity 2006-2019, “helped jail some 650 individuals for corruption and related crimes.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/biden-can-revive-latin-americas-most-successful-anti-corruption-project?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_030421&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5c48efcf2ddf9c4807adf975&cndid=53684912&hasha=8fcd7efd9e9d6389b9f914ad34a5948d&hashb=be86af3880f5d49a71f804266e79b70bb4fa408d&hashc=f553fa26cd5d27697a335ab74e22a11c9b48c47784712d14145ae3c0ed4aad10&esrc=bounceX&mbid=CRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_Daily
Truth commissions sometimes include an examination of cases of corruption. The Liberian truth commission, for example, investigated economic crimes, which it found perpetuated the armed conflict, and the Timor-Leste commission not only looked at corruption and economics but also in its final report asked multinational companies who supported Indonesia during its brutal rule to fund reparation programs. Reparations, too, have focused on wealth obtained by corruption. For example, Switzerland returned to the Philippines $627 million in assets held in Swiss bank accounts of the ex-dictator Ferdinand Marcos; the government had to agree to use the funds for reparations to victims of human rights violations. Use of records was key: “The Philippines was able to recover Marcos diaries and documents in Malacañang when the family fled Manila on February 25, 1986. Such documents revealed the existence of secret bank accounts in Switzerland.” https://newslab.philstar.com/31-years-of-amnesia/never-convicted
Corruption tilts the scales against the welfare of the public. It siphons money from public use and drives policies that are not in the public interest. Corruption around the supply of COVID-19 vaccines is a serious risk “that may threaten vital public health goals,” the UN Office on Drugs and Crime recently warned. https://www.unodc.org/documents/corruption/COVID-19/Policy_paper_on_COVID-19_vaccines_and_corruption_risks.pdf Good recordkeeping, sound access policies, thorough research use can weigh the scales toward anti-corruption. Records can help nations tilt towards justice.
April: Talking about law
Want to stop a conversation? Say two words: archives law. Although government archives are a public good, not much attention is paid to them until a crisis occurs and the information the archives holds is essential. Of course, there are laws and laws: out of date, limited, over-ridden by other laws, not enforced, and even sometimes good. Here are a few of the problems with current national archives laws.
For example: India’s 1993 archives law says, “No public records bearing security classification shall be transferred to the National Archives of India or the Archives of the Union Territory.” That means, of course, that no records of military, intelligence, foreign relations, or police (at minimum) can be transferred to the national archives until they are declassified. And, therefore, the easiest way to keep records from being available to researchers at the archives is simply not to declassify them. Efforts have been made to revise the law, but so far with no success.
For example: Honduras has no current archives law. The national archives was created in 1880. A decree on the “protection of the cultural patrimony of the nation” was issued in 1984, but it is oriented principally to anthropological concerns, with just a few articles on documents and libraries. It says that creating offices hold their records for 50 years before passing them to the national archives, a passive statement that permits transfer but does not require it. Consequently, when the Honduras truth commission finished its work, there was no requirement that it transfer its records to the national archives, and they have since disappeared into other offices.
For example: In Ireland, the National Archives Act was amended in 2018. It makes possible, under certain procedures, to transfer to the national archives records from departments that are 20 years old (regular transfers occur at 30). But there is no provision that allows the accession of records less than 20 years old. Consequently, when the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes completed its work this year, with important, sensitive records, there was no possibility to transfer them to the national archives without special legislation—although the archives law specifically states that the records destined for the archives include those made by the “any body which is a committee, commission or tribunal of enquiry appointed from time to time by the Government, a member of the Government or the Attorney General.” The Commission’s archives were transferred to the Ministry of Children, not to the national archives that can provide professional preservation, access review, and reference service. (See SAHR News 2021-02 for background.)
The last international survey of archives legislation was published by the International Council on Archives in 1995; an update is sorely needed. In 2004 the Committee on Legal Matters of the International Council on Archives published “Principles for Archives and Records Legislation.” It is the most current international statement of the desirable characteristics of national archival legislation, but also needs a review and possible updating. https://www.ica.org/en/draft-principles-archives-and-record-legislation-2004
Ensuring preservation of the records of temporary bodies, such as the truth commission of Honduras or the Baby Homes Commission of Ireland, requires both adequate coverage by an archives law but also a track of their disposition when the commission ends. The Section on Archives and Human Rights, in cooperation with swisspeace, is starting a project to create a central, online source of easily updatable information on the current location of the archives of closed truth commissions. We believe it will benefit both archivists who may be accessioning the archives of a truth commission and want to be in contact with institutions that have already done so and persons seeking to do research in truth commission records for legal, humanitarian or academic purposes. A steering committee of 3-5 persons, representing both institutions, will establish the parameters of data to be collected, organize the collection of data, ensure the consistency of data collected, and ensure the entry of the data into the dataset. The steering committee will contact colleagues in the respective countries to obtain data. In some countries it may not be possible to locate the truth commission archives, but this also is important information for the potential user and will be documented.
So, at your post-COVID dinner party, when the conversation lags, do not say “archives law” but talk about the remarkable records like those of births and those of bombs, of truth commissions and military tribunals, that need to be preserved for us all.
May: Apologies required
Apologies made, apologies needed: that seemed to be May’s flavor.
*Mexico embarked on a year-long “sorry” program. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued an apology to the Maya people of Mexico “for what he described as five centuries of abuse committed by foreign and Mexican authorities and longstanding discrimination that continues to the present day;” later in the month he apologized for the 1911 massacre of 303 Chinese in the northern Mexican city of Torreon during the Mexican Revolution. https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/mx-apologizes-for-1911-killings/
*Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized “for the internment of Canadians of Italian descent during the Second World War.” He said “31,000 Italian Canadians were labelled ‘enemy aliens’ and then fingerprinted, scrutinized and forced to report to local registrars once a month.” https://torontosun.com/news/national/trudeau-delivers-apology-to-italian-canadians-for-internment-during-second-world-war
*Germany “formally recognized as genocide the crimes committed by its colonial troops at the beginning of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia.” When President Frank-Walter Steinmeier travels to Namibia later this year he will issue a formal apology. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-officially-recognizes-colonial-era-namibia-genocide/a-57671070 ; https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/29698/germany-s-and-the-west-s-insufficient-reckoning-with-the-herero-genocide
*In a phone call to Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first ministers, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologized for the “British army operation that resulted in the death of 10 innocent civilians in the est Belfast neighborhood of Ballymurphy in 1971.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/12/boris-johnson-apologises-unreservedly-over-ballymurphy-deaths
*And in Rwanda, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “I have to come to recognize our responsibilities” for the 1994 genocide, not quite an apology but Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said, “His words were something more valuable than an apology, they were the truth.” https://www.npr.org/2021/05/27/1000872505/frances-macron-admits-some-guilt-for-rwandas-genocide
The German apology is part of the resolution, many years in the making, of claims against Germany by the victims, some of whom still were not satisfied. The U.K. apology came a day after an inquest in Northern Ireland “found the use of force had been unjustified” and the coroner delivered a “blistering report” rejecting army claims that “troops had opened fire only when they perceived they were under threat.” The daughter of one of the victims said, “His apology means nothing. We need him to go back to the MoD [Ministry of Defense] and tell them to tell the truth, tell our legal team the names of the soldiers who murdered our loved ones and ask them why.” The French move came after both an official French report and a Rwanda one laid out the French role in the leadup to and during the 1994 massacre. Pressure from civil society and, in the cases of Namibia and Rwanda, a country, created recognition by a government that acknowledgement and apology were part of the social justice that was required.
At the same time as these reparative acts were in the news, so too were signs that civil society was under threat. Across the world during the pandemic, CIVICUS Monitor “documented a range of restrictions on rights introduced by governments under the pretext of protecting people’s health and lives.” https://monitor.civicus.org/COVID19May2021/
*In Nicaragua, police raided the offices of the independent news outlets Confidencial, Esta Semana, and Esta Noche, facilities where, a police officer said, “the coup mongers meet and work.” The police briefly arrested two reporters and confiscated internal documents, personal possessions, and professional equipment. Nicaraguan prosecutors opened an investigation into “money laundering” against Cristiana Chamorro, the former head of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, a human rights organization that closed in February rather than register as a foreign agent; she is a presidential primary candidate and “anyone under criminal investigation cannot run for political office.” https://mailchi.mp/elfaro.net/el-faro-english-political-arrests-nicaragua-guatemala-6212872?e=b68035e8b1; https://www.npr.org/2021/05/20/998795586/ortega-targets-opposition-figures-as-nicaraguan-elections-approach
*In neighboring Guatemala, the Constitutional Court upheld a law that forces NGOs “to register, report their donations and allow their accounts to be inspected. Under certain circumstances, it would also allow NGOs to be dissolved, controlled and monitored.” https://kfgo.com/2021/05/12/guatemalas-top-court-backs-controversial-ngo-law-overturns-past-ruling/?emci=b8d1be8a-afb4-eb11-a7ad-0050f271b5d8&emdi=eabdda87-b0b4-eb11-a7ad-0050f271b5d8&ceid=4606001; https://mailchi.mp/dist/la-cidh-y-su-rele-rechazan-entrada-en-vigor-de-reformas-a-la-ley-de-organizaciones-no-gubernamentales-en-guatemala?e=bee49d752c
*On April 29, the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace issued an ordinance requiring all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country to register with the national anti-terrorism office, implying a link between NGOs and terrorism. http://spgoin.imprentanacional.gob.ve/cgi-win/be_alex.cgi?Documento=T028700035845/0&Nombrebd=spgoin&CodAsocDoc=2526&TipoDoc=GCTOF&t05=png&TSalida=I&Sesion=164964439&T05=PDF&T04=0&utm_source=WOLA+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=e489addbfb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_05_19_07_51&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_54f161a431-e489addbfb-133911529
*On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, police in Belarus raided the office of the independent news site TUT.BY and the homes of several of its editors, some of whom were arrested, “accusing the organization of avoiding tax.” The Ministry of Information said the General Prosecutor’s office had “established numerous facts of violations of the law” by TUT.BY “in terms of posting prohibited information in a number of publications on the TUT.BY website” including content about the “unregistered” BYSOL foundation, which aims to support victims of repression in the country. “It is prohibited to disseminate information on Internet resources on behalf of organizations that have not undergone state registration in the prescribed manner,” the Ministry said. https://www.euronews.com/2021/05/18/tut-by-independent-belarus-media-website-blocked-after-series-of-raids
*In Israel, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said Israel was acting to “delegitimize” human rights non-governmental organizations in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Syrian Golan. “The strategy put in place by the Israeli Government is threefold: one, delegitimizing civil society critical voices through ‘naming and shaming’ and associating them with terrorists or anti-Semitics; two, pressuring any one giving a platform for their discourse; three, lobbying actively to cut their sources of funding. . . . These trends have reached alarming proportions, and significantly undermine the ability of human rights defenders and NGOs to carry out their legitimate and crucial work.” https://target-locked-obs-defenders.org/IMG/pdf/obs_palestine2021ang-1.pdf
Without the pressure of civil society, without the work of NGOs, the apologies would not have happened. The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted in 1998, affirmed, “Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to solicit, receive and utilize resources for the express purpose of promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms through peaceful means.” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SRHRDefenders/Pages/Translation.aspx The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, concerned about the Guatemala NGO law, pointed out “the free and full enjoyment of freedom of association imposes on states the duty to create legal and factual conditions through which human rights defenders, media and journalists can freely exercise their work.” https://www.oas.org/en/IACHR/jsForm/?File=/es/cidh/prensa/comunicados/2021/128.asp
Raids on offices, seizures of computers and documents, onerous compulsory registrations, complex permits required for public gathering: documentation of all these show the limits on the right of association promoted by repressive states. Preserving these documents, by nongovernmental bodies, individuals, and, yes, the states themselves, can lead the way to a future date in which the state says, “We were wrong. We apologize.”
June: Where are the records of informed consent?
What is informed consent? Many people, perhaps most of us, routinely click on “accept” when confronted with a website that requires acknowledgement of our user data to access the site. Similarly, we may not read all the information on a rental agreement for a car or the lease of an apartment, but we sign anyway. We consent, and the record shows that we were indeed informed.
The traditional understanding of informed consent was about medical practices. A patient would be asked to consent to a medical procedure only after being told about all the possible consequences of taking the drug or having the procedure and the informed consent would be recorded in the patient’s medical record. Today the application of the concept of informed consent has expanded mightily. Some examples:
*In its first global report on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, the World Health Organization issued 6 guiding principles, saying AI “holds great promise for improving the delivery of health care and medicine worldwide, but only if ethics and human rights are put at the heart of its design, deployment, and use.” The first principle says “patients must give valid informed consent through appropriate legal frameworks for data protection.” https://www.who.int/news/item/28-06-2021-who-issues-first-global-report-on-ai-in-health-and-six-guiding-principles-for-its-design-and-use
*The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Ecuador violated the rights of Eduardo Guachala Cimbo, “a person with a disability who suffered from epilepsy” who disappeared from a hospital in 2004. In a suit brought by his mother, who had signed his “committal authorization,” the Court found that he had not given informed consent to his treatment and further “that the use of the victim’s disability to argue that his informed consent was not necessary for his committal and medication, and the lack of access to the necessary medications, amounted to discrimination based on disability.” https://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/comunicados/cp_36_2021_eng.pdf
*In December 2020 the High Court of England and Wales ruled that person under 16 years of age was unlikely to be able to consent meaningfully to taking puberty blocker hormone to promote development of the physical characteristics of the opposite sex. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/05/13/doubts-are-growing-about-therapy-for-gender-dysphoric-children
*In just one of many cases in which a doctor used his own sperm to inseminate a woman having fertility treatments, a woman, told by her son that the sperm used was not her husband’s, said she “certainly never consented to anyone else’s material being used.” Through DNA testing the son’s sister found she had been conceived by the same process. The doctor’s family, who was of a different faith than the mother, did not welcome the half-siblings. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/life/2021/05/14/iowa-fertility-doctor-used-own-sperm-donor-fraud-artificial-insemination/5075444001/
*The UN High Commissioner for Refugees came under sharp criticism from Human Rights Watch, which said UNHCR “improperly collected and shared personal information from ethnic Rohingya refugees with Bangladesh, which shared it with Myanmar to verify people for possible repatriation.” UNHCR responded, explaining that during registration in Bangladesh, “refugees were separately and expressly asked whether they gave their consent to have their data shared with the Government of Myanmar by the Government of Bangladesh. . . refugees were free to refuse the data sharing . . Each family’s consent was confirmed at least twice and consent signatures were only obtained following this double-confirmation.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/15/un-shared-rohingya-data-without-informed-consent#; https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/press/2021/6/60c85a7b4/news-comment-statement-refugee-registration-data-collection-bangladesh.html
*YHRD is the world’s largest database containing Y-chromosome profiles from men across the world. Forensic scientists use it to compare DNA from human material collected at a crime scene with the profiles stored there. YHRD has come under fire from some geneticists, who believe “thousands of the profiles it holds were obtained from men who are unlikely to have given free, informed consent,” including “from minority ethnic populations such as the Uyghurs in China and the Roma in eastern Europe.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01584-w
So how do we think about the records of our informed consent when data about us can spread so widely without our understanding? Is it different if it is a one-on-one relationship, such as a patient with a doctor and the patient’s records stay with the medical facility where the patient is treated, from Y chromosome data in a database that is shared worldwide, making family links possible but also identifying possible perpetrators of crimes?
In all cases, it is essential to preserve the records of consent. Who is responsible? Medical facilities keep records of informed consent of patients, and patients should also be given a copy of the agreement. For self-submitted consent, such as for permission to access a website or to post information to social media or to lease a car, both the institutional host of the website and the person are responsible. It is more complicated when three parties are involved: the person, the entity that collected the original consent and the entity that now holds data that it did not originally collect. Should the third party, whether Bangladesh or the YHRD database managers, hold a copy of the record of informed consent or is that responsibility only with the information provider? Does it matter if that provider to a third party is a state (presumably China for Uyghur material) or a medical or other nongovernmental institution? We all need to understand who is responsible for the archives of our informed consent.
July: The "at least" problem
We have an “at least” problem. In the June issue of SAHR News, I quoted media 15 times as saying “at least” so many people died, crimes were committed, firearms were lost. Why this lack of precision?
Calls for better data—from information on the onset of COVID to excessive use of force by police to the number of missing persons—abound. For example, the ALLIED Data Working Group, consisting of a dozen NGOs, released a joint briefing in July on “the limits to official data on attacks against [human rights] defenders and why it’s concerning.” The group wrote that official data on killings is “extremely limited, while even less data is available on the physical and death threats that often precede lethal attacks . . . few countries are monitoring the situation adequately, if at all.” Of the 162 countries that have submitted voluntary national reviews (VNRs) of their implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals since 2015, “only 3—fewer than 2%--indicated that at least one HRD [human rights defender] had been killed or attacked. Seven countries reported zero cases and 94% of countries did not report at all.” It noted, and the items in the monthly SAHR News confirm, that the “overwhelming majority of cases reported . . come from civil society data collectors and not from state-led reporting or human rights mechanisms.” https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/from-us/briefings/a-crucial-gap-the-limits-to-official-data-on-attacks-against-defenders-and-why-its-concerning/?mc_cid=517ad7ba9f&mc_eid=f1f6556540
Looking at some of the reasons for the “at least” qualification helps understand the problem. Sometimes it is simply the difficulty of getting the information; for example, how many people were killed in remote parts of the Congo during conflicts is hard if not impossible to document. Sometimes the relevant records were destroyed, whether by accident, neglect, or intention. Wars, fires, and termites all bear responsibility. Sometimes the information was intentionally not recorded; see Russia/Ukraine below for situations when Ukraine did not record an initial detention. Sometimes the information comes only from the national level, excluding information from local sources that might be different—and sometimes the local sources do not report regularly or at all to the central authority. There may be distrust of existing information; for example, knowing that the number of COVID deaths in child care facilities is underreported and, perhaps, to save embarrassment, the number is reported as “at least.” And sometimes it is sloppy recordkeeping. Nearly a century ago Sir Josiah Stamp quoted an English judge on the subject of Indian statistics: “The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the Nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.” Sir Josiah Stamp, Some Economic Factors in Modern Life, pp. 259-259, P.S. King and Son. London, 1929.
Archives are, of course, full of data, raw and refined. Researchers using archival holdings need always to be aware of the limitations that numbers—seemingly so precise—elide. When archives certify copies of records for researchers they are only certifying that this is an exact copy of the record in question; they are not certifying the numbers in it. At least, researchers should be aware of that limitation.
August: The digital records paradox
Any doubts that information security is the current crisis should have been answered by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August. The frightening messages came quickly: The Taliban have captured U.S. military databases. The Taliban have access to the government’s database of employees and would use that to hunt them down. The Taliban have access to the government website and is planning to shut it down. Hundreds of people seeking to leave were on cellphones, not sure if the messages they were sending were being intercepted. The worries multiplied by the minute.
The issues surrounding the Afghan digital crisis are many and complex. They include access to: electronic records created by the former Afghan government that are now in the hands of the new governors (digital identity cards for an estimated 6.2 million of the 40 million Afghans, for example), records created by the U.S. and other coalition partners that were captured by the Taliban (including employee records and drone targeting information), biometric information in the hands of intergovernmental and humanitarian agencies that work or worked in Afghanistan, personal information on social media and on cellphones. It is beyond the scope of this commentary to discuss all of these, but reading some of the links listed at the end will introduce the wide-ranging discussions.
A particular concern was that digital IDs and databases would be used to target people, with special worry about the use of biometrics such as iris scans and fingerprints. As a scholar who studies security commented, “With biometrics, the concern is, you can take a new name but you can’t really take a new iris.” This led to a two-fold discussion: what information should be collected (interestingly, the Afghan National Police’s ID card application form shows the names of father and grandfather of the applicant but not of the mother; an Afghan involved with the police explained to MIT Technology Review, “Some people don’t like to share their mother’s name in our cultures”) and when should the collected information be deleted. Karl Steinacker, formerly at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees where he “for several years” was “in charge of registration, biometrics, and the digital identity of refugees,” argued that if there is no longer an operational need “it makes no sense” to keep the biometric data, whether anonymized or not. He called for “an inventory of data: what data is there, what is needed and what is not needed, where are the copies . . . and is this data potentially damaging to people in the database?” This argument slights the possible use of personal information, whether biometric or not, for other than operational purposes, such as searches for the missing, family reunion, identity clarification, and historical analysis. Here is where archivists must be a part of the decision-making before the records are destroyed.
As the Taliban advanced, individuals scrambled to delete information from cellphones and personal computers. The NGO Human Rights First published guides in Dari and Pashto to teach people how to delete their social media accounts, but following that good advice was clearly a problem for the estimated “13.5% of Afghans who have access to the internet at home” if there was no or poor access to electricity and the internet. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all said they had “taken steps to help” secure data on their platforms. Four important human rights organizations—Access Now, Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, and Mnemonic—while acknowledging the need of the online platforms to “restrict content that unlawfully incites or promotes violence,” called on the technology companies “to preserve and archive removed content that may have evidentiary value of human rights abuses, including content identified by human rights organizations, while ensuring the privacy and security of vulnerable individuals associated with that content.”
As you skim the items in this issue of SAHR News, note the entries about the use by governments of information in registration systems, which presumably are digital, to enforce or deny services (Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, UAE, Lebanon/Syria). And see the items on the businesses—diet programs and the T-Mobile telecommunications company—that seem to collect more personal digital information than they need. Then think about the security of those systems and the privacy of the people whose information resides in them. The benefits of electronic records and registration systems are real, but so are the risks. That is the digital records paradox.
HRF Fact Sheet (humanrightsfirst.org); https://restofworld.org/2021/afghans-social-media-taliban/;
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/30/preserve-evidence-potential-rights-abuses-afghanistan;
https://news.trust.org/item/20210817111442-4d73x/; https://news.trust.org/item/20210820080622-5wjww/; https://theintercept.com/2021/08/17/afghanistan-taliban-military-biometrics/; https://theintercept.com/2021/08/17/afghanistan-taliban-military-biometrics/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter;
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg89kk/afghanistans-government-websites-are-frozen-in-time?utm_source=email&utm_medium=editorial&utm_content=news&utm_campaign=210831; https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/30/1033941/afghanistan-biometric-databases-us-military-40-data-points/; https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/interview/2021/2/9/the-risks-of-biometric-data-and-the-taliban; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/29/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-revenge.html;
September: White flags of COVID-19
White flags—nearly 700,00 of them—fluttered on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in September, one for every person in the U.S. who has died of Covid-19. https://i.natgeofe.com/n/4822dc08-0db8-4499-b752-2ab308e510b0/20210917_DC_FLAGS_NIKON_Z7_CARD_3_0036_b_16x9.jpg?w=1200 These mass illnesses and deaths, in the U.S. and around the world, have generated an equally massive volume of records.
The records story begins with the records of research, as scientists raced to develop a vaccine. Other researchers tried to find the source of the virus, a search that continues, with one group believing it came from a lab in China and another believing it derives from a natural origin such as bats. Still other researchers are working to find a drug that can be taken orally at home at the onset of a Covid illness to prevent developing serious disease and hospitalization. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter; https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2/
Along with the race for a vaccine, manufacturing turned to production of everything from vials to carry the vaccine, syringes and needles to administer it, cartons and refrigeration equipment to store and transport it, and personal protective gear for medical workers and, well, just everyone. The business records for this switch in manufacturing or acceleration of production must be enormous. Then came the challenge of transporting vaccines from the factory to the place where the injection can be given: trucks and planes, shipment and delivery, tracking and monitoring. (For a U.S. view, see https://theconversation.com/how-covid-19-vaccines-will-get-from-the-factory-to-your-local-pharmacy-151362)
Now, with vaccines available, although unevenly across the world (for a look at what is called “vaccine apartheid,” see https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/african-leaders-highlight-vaccine-inequity-speeches-80189809) other issues have arisen: Who gets the vaccine? How can we know someone has been vaccinated? How many people have died? All are questions that involve documents.
Who gets the vaccine, in countries where it is available? The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Daily Telegraph reported on the administrative barriers in Europe that are “blocking access to Covid-19 vaccines for nearly 4 million undocumented migrants. Countries including Germany, Spain, Norway and Bulgaria require some form of ID, health card or a residency permit. In Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia and Greece, vaccinations are officially available only to people with a social security number.” https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-09-01/red-tape-keeping-covid-vaccine-out-of-reach-for-nearly-4m-undocumented-migrants-across-europe?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=26db4f08a1-MR_COPY_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-26db4f08a1-149736437
How do we know who is vaccinated? “Medics in Bulgaria are increasingly concerned about what they believe is a thriving black market in fake documents that purport to prove that the holder is vaccinated against or has tested negative for COVID-19,” BIRN reported. Bulgaria is the country with the lowest vaccination rate in Europe, with only 20% of the population vaccinated by the end of September. (See also the item on slavery, below, for another instance of certification fraud.) https://balkaninsight.com/2021/09/29/fake-vaccination-certificates-add-to-bulgarias-covid-19-woes/
And in the hard-hit U.S., a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned, in an essay published in the New York Times, that “without a unified approach to verify compliance” with vaccination requirements, “verification will be inaccurate, inconsistent and potentially insecure.” Further, he wrote, “without clear safeguards, digital verification systems could be compromised: Vaccination status could be falsified, and private health data could be shared publicly.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/cdc-coronavirus-vaccine.html
And how do we know who has died? As Covid swept through India, the “shortcomings” of its death records “were suddenly on display,” Undark reported. India simply did not know how many people were dying of Covid. Although a government survey in 2018 suggested that India “registered 86% of all its deaths in its civil registration system,” only 1 in 5 deaths were “medically certified by a physician” and even those doctors are not all “well trained to certify deaths.” Cause of death data is like the “thermometer of a health system,” an Indian public health doctor said, and an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto explained, “Counting the dead helps the living. The main benefit of having data on who dies, and when, is to be able to understand what can be done about it today.” https://undark.org/2021/09/01/the-struggle-to-keep-track-of-indias-dead/
Archivists in many parts of the world are actively seeking to document the impact of Covid-19 on communities, families, and individuals. Archivists in business, government, and scientific and medical facilities, too, urgently need to capture the records of the response to the pandemic. Just as the president of Tanzania told the UN General Assembly, “We tend to forget that no one is safe until everyone is safe,” no one body of records or personal materials will tell the whole story of the pandemic and the responses to it. Also at the UN, the president of Bolivia said, “Access to the vaccine should be considered a human right.” Archivists, as duty-bearers for human rights, must ensure that the records of the complex response to Covid-19 are selected, preserved, and made available to ensure that the world, now and in the future, knows that all these things happened among us.
October: Meta?
Meta? No more Facebook; now it’s Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of the company, thinks we want to live in a virtual world, at least part of the time. He says the Meta world will provide “immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.” https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-meta/
Changing a name is a big step, whether for a corporation or a person. When I married years ago, it was assumed you would take your husband’s name. I remember how hard that was, how different it seemed to be when I was referred to by a name that had a different ethnic ring than my own, how much paperwork was associated with changing all my bank accounts and insurance and voting registrations. But at least I had all those documents to change. And while the change upset my sense of self for a while, it did not break my fundamental sense of identity.
UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 is, “By 2030, provide legal identity for all including birth registration.” https://sdgs.un.org That goal clearly refers to a person’s name and, probably, citizenship and perhaps property ownership, but identity is more than that. As Psychology Today writes, “identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/identity In what it termed a “landmark ruling” in a case brought by the Ava Guarani people of the Campo Agua’e indigenous community, the UN Human Rights Committee said “for Indigenous people, ‘home’ should be understood in the context of their special relationship with their territories, including their livestock, crops and way of life” (for fuller discussion, see item on Paraguay below). For the Ava Guarani, as for other Indigenous people, their identity is rooted in place.
In her report to the UN General Assembly, Karima Bennoune, the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, called for greater recognition of human rights-respecting cultural mixing and syncretism and increased respect for mixed cultural identities. The report does not specifically discuss archives, but Recommendation J is “Make available to all education about and documentation of the diversities and hybridities of cultural practices, cultural heritages and histories of cultural borrowing and mixing.”
https://undocs.org/en/a/76/178 Archives have a part in that.
Looked at in this broad scope, archives hold truly vast volumes of records relating to identity. Beyond citizenship, beyond identification cards, records of the treatment of women, Indigenous peoples, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, mixed-race, adoptees, migrants, victims (with all the complications of that term), all are documented in archives holdings. And, as we are learning, artificial intelligence is driving predictive policing, often based on the presumed link between some element of identity and criminal behavior (see below under Technology). Archivists must be alert to the need to acquire and describe and responsibly provide access to records that relate to identity.
Meta? Archivists have enough challenges in the real world.
November: Preserving archives, protecting peace
As we come to the end of the calendar year, many of us engage in stocktaking, reflecting on our lives and our community and our world and how peaceful or not we think they are. We are all involved, one way or another, in keeping peace.
Peace is a never-ending process, but there are distinct differences between the peace that is being built after a conflict, whether civil or international, and peace keeping, which is part of the vigilance we all need to exercise in our daily lives. Peace-building after societal conflict must both address the causes of the conflict and build a way to handle future disagreements without recourse to violence. At its heart, peace-building is a local matter. Many, many studies have been made of the efficacy of top-down peace-building institutions such as peace accords, truth commissions, special courts, and restitution processes, with the answers varying. What is assuredly true, however, is that issues that directly affect people’s lives must be handled if peace is to prevail. Two of these issues are almost universal: resolving property disputes (housing and farm land, particularly) and locating missing persons. Archives—those valuable records of institutions and families and individuals--can play a role in clarifying both.
Land records have been a part of government record-keeping for millennia. While they may not be accurate, they are an essential first step to demonstrate title. But titles or claims to property can also be documented by copies of deeds kept by a person, a mortgage or a rental agreement or an insurance policy, records of water rights and maps of traditional grazing lands and sacred places, for example.
Not knowing what happened to a loved one is traumatic. Many different forms of documentation showing fate exist, from records of refugee-supporting organizations, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees or NGOs such Refugees International, to records of military units or paramilitaries detaining persons, records of hospitals, including police and military hospitals, death certificates and records of morgues and cemeteries.
The difficulty in all these cases, of property and persons, is gaining access to the relevant records. Governments and paramilitaries may deny records exist or deny access to them, even if a court orders access. Business records are hard to get. Corruption, too, is part of the problem: refusal to recognize land title unless a bribe is paid, for instance. And, of course, records may have been destroyed during conflict with no possibility of recovery, leaving oral testimony as the only recourse.
None of this is easy, not gaining access nor looking at an image of destruction or death. But records--of governments, businesses, religious bodies, non-governmental institutions, and individuals—can give us a foundation to use for peace-building and peace-keeping. Archivists are duty-bearers for human rights, protecting records for the promise of peace.
December: Archives: a potent bulwark against human rights violations
December’s commentary is usually a list of important or simply interesting items, chosen from the year’s monthly issues. I had already started compiling the list when staggering events pushed away all thought of the usual: the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa and the Russian court-ordered liquidation of Memorial International, its Human Rights Center, and the extension of the prison term of Yuri Dmitriev, an historian who had chaired Memorial’s regional branch in the province of Karelia. Make no mistake: these are blows.
Archbishop Tutu was the keynote speaker at the 2003 world meeting of archivists in Cape Town, South Africa. In his quiet, charismatic way, he challenged those of us fortunate enough to be in the room. “We are ashamed of that part of our history but it is our history nonetheless,” he said. “And it stands there recorded in our National Archives. . . . The records are crucial to hold us accountable . . .They are a potent bulwark against human rights violations. We must remember our past so that we do not repeat it.” Out of that encounter, a small group of archivists formed a human rights working group within the International Council on Archives. No one had any thought about an enduring function; we just wanted to do something. Now, almost 20 years later, the Section on Archives and Human Rights is a stable, recognized part of the ICA world, and the issue you are reading is a direct result of the inspiration of the late Archbishop. (For a fuller appreciation of the archival impact of Archbishop Tutu, see the statement written for the Section by former South Africa national archivist and organizer of the 2003 meeting Graham Dominy: https://www.ica.org/en/obituary-desmond-tutu)
Memorial was founded in Russia in 1989, growing out of a popular movement to expose the political repression in the Soviet Union, particularly during the dark years of Stalin’s rule. It grew into a major human rights organization, Memorial International, with 60 affiliate organizations across the country and in Europe and an associated Human Rights Center that assists migrants, refugees and internally-displaced people, as well as maintaining lists of political prisoners and obtaining critical records from the government that uncover the nature and extent of persecution in the past. According to the Washington Post, the Human Rights Center “has helped more than 1,500 Russians take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights . . to challenge rights abuses by Russian authorities.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/russia-rights-memorial-liquidated/
From its beginning, Memorial acquired documentation to create a record of the crimes of the state against its citizens. Its archives now contains at least 60,000 case files on victims of Soviet state repression, a database containing 3 million names of victims, and another database with “the names of nearly 42,000 people who worked for the Soviet secret police from 1935 to 1939, when repression peaked,” the Post also reported. Memorial also collects physical objects—from clothes to paintings to typewriters--which it displays in a museum in Moscow. People donate items to Memorial; the New York Times reported on a November 2021 donation of papers of a woman who had been imprisoned in the Russian labor camps. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/world/europe/russia-memorial-human-rights.html
In the same week that the courts ruled on the two parts of Memorial, a Russian court extended the prison term of Yuri Dmitriev, the former Memorial regional chair, to 15 years from 13. “Mr. Dmitriev, who discovered mass graves resulting from Stalin’s brutalities, was convicted of sexually abusing his adopted daughter, a charge he denied,” the New York Times explained. For background on the lengthy Dmitriev case, see SAHR News 2020-4, HRWG News 2018-01, 04.
The world reacted with sorrow to the death of the Archbishop; dozens of governments and non-governmental organizations issued strong protests over the closing of Memorial. Archivists everywhere worry about the fate of Memorial’s irreplaceable holdings. The archives needs to be protected; the physical documents and objects can’t be moved easily to a safe haven outside Russia (although copies of its databases are surely preserved outside the country), and the information the archives contains must continue to be available to the Russian people and all others whose fate is recorded there. As an appeal of the court’s ruling goes forward, it is essential to create a “safe haven in place” for the archives. Governments and all concerned organizations must work with Memorial and with Russian officials to find a way forward. As the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial in Poland tweeted about the closing of Memorial, in an echo of the Archbishop, “A power that is afraid of memory will never be able to achieve democratic maturity.”
[1] Correction: sentence revised after consultation with Ms. Araya. Sincere apologies for the error.