Archival commentaries July – December 2013
July: Biometric databases as archives
From Israel to the Congo, biometric databases were in the news in July. Israel launched a biometric database as a two-year pilot project, reported ifex.org. The government’s idea is to link the identity cards carried by Israelis citizens to a database carrying fingerprints and data on “facial contours” to make “identity cards less susceptible to forgery and misuse by criminals or terrorists.” Human rights groups have challenged the pilot in the Israeli Supreme Court on grounds both of privacy and of the security of the data (in 2006 information from Israel’s Census Authority on 9 million citizens was leaked over the internet). http://www.ifex.org/israel/2013/07/24/biometric_database/
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations’ International Organization on Migration also has a pilot project on biometrics. According to information the IOM provided to Inner City Press, “Lacking a national registry of population, and specifically vulnerable populations, IOM and other humanitarian organizations have had to use manual registration process relying on, typically, worn and outdated voter registration cards issued by the Government of DRC to identify and track beneficiaries of aid. The proposed biometric registration system is based on previous IOM implementation including, but not limited to, Sudan . . The process consists of finger print devices and servers to store and cross-check the information.” IOM said it “will adhere to strict information management principles while also engaging in information sharing with humanitarian organizations in need to such information, including the World Food Programme who was a principal partner of us in the digital registration in Sudan.” http://innercitypress.blogspot.com/2013/07/biometrics-in-drc-explained-by-iom-as.html
Elsewhere, the troubled nation of Guinea-Bissau is considering a biometric census, after its National Assembly passed a law allowing biometric voter registration. In July the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Guinea-Bissau called it a “time-consuming and costly” choice and urged the country to use manual registration for the upcoming election. http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2013_26.pdf; http://uniogbis.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?ctl=Details&tabid=9874&mid=12838&ItemID=20420. Nigeria in June established a biometric data base for all arrested illegal immigrants, Punch reported, and is considering a mass biometric census. http://www.punchng.com/feature/lagos-pulse/immigration-sets-up-biometric-database-for-deported-immigrants/ And India is creating the world’s largest biometric database, registering biological information on its 1.2 billion people. (For a glimpse of the global spread of biometric databases, see the annual report of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S. NGO, at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/biometric-id-systems-grew-internationally-2012-and-so-did-concerns-about-privacy.)
What data goes into a biometric database? It varies by country and by project, but it may include fingerprints and palm prints, scans of the eye’s iris and retina, photographs that show facial contours, samples of handwriting, recordings of speech, and DNA codes. In other words, the data that serves to distinguish one person from another.
Governments and universities and businesses are all deeply involved in research into biometrics. The U.S. government-supported Biometric Consortium lists projects from, for example, Italy’s University of Bologna and China’s Center for Biometrics and Security Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. http://www.biometrics.org/html/research.html The work is so widespread that the International Standards Organization has a special committee, JTC 1/SC 37, to work on biometrics topics.
Much of the debate about the use of biometrics has focused on privacy and security: Should the government or business have this information on me? How will the holder of the information keep it secure? Little has been written about the archival implications of this highly personal data in institutional databases, but given the rapid spread of these programs all over the world, it is essential that archivists focus on it now.
Twenty years ago some archivists argued that databases were not records, while others regularly appraised databases for retention or disposal. Moreover, archivists often appraised the paper records that preceded an automated database (for example, the fingerprint files of the police); sometimes the automation of the records led archivists to reappraise them and retain some that, because of volume, had been nearly unmanageable in paper formats.
The debate over whether databases are records is now antique. Databases are simply the way organizations operate today, and archivists must incorporate them into the archival program. Some of the biometric databases being created will have a short life, like the aid recipient databases created by the United Nations (one must hope). Others, such as identity databases, are likely to stay in the custody of the creating agency for long periods of time. But in either case, and in whatever institution the databases are created and maintained, archivists need to ensure that they know what data is collected, how it is managed, and whether it should be preserved after its primary use ends. It is a solemn responsibility with serious implications for the rights of us all.
August: Archives and records of identity
August in the northern hemisphere is the heart of summer. Activity slows down, and cities empty of all except tourists. Schools are on vacation, and families spend time together. News is usually slow.
Not this August. Major organizations, from the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights to Twitter, published reports. Courts handed down decisions, like the court in Turkey that sentenced 254 people at once in the biggest case in the country’s history. The revelations of spying by U.S. agencies continued to roll out, affecting countries around the world.
A cluster of events in August involved records that concern identity: who is a citizen, who has a specific ethnicity, what is my sexual orientation. The most explosive story was from Russia, where a vigilante group is publishing videos of its attempts to “cure” by despicable means people they believe are homosexual. Here the videos are the record of the “identity.” Next door, in the country of Georgia, prospective brides seek to confirm their identity as virgins by getting “virginity certificates” from the government.
Moving from sex to ethnicity, a newspaper in Turkey learned that the government’s Population Directorate maintains a registry of minorities that identifies each family’s ethnicity as determined in 1923: 1 for Greek, 2 for Armenian, 3 for Jews, 4 for Syriacs and 5 for “other.” Exactly how the ethnicity was designated in the first place is not clear, but it has eerie echoes of other historical brandings. Also related to ethnicity but happier, the census in Bolivia showed many fewer people self-identifying with a specific ethnicity; in fact, the majority of the population registered as “mixed” ethnicity.
And then there are the records of citizenship. Cote d’Ivoire passed two new laws easing access to citizenship, one of the issues at the center of its political crisis since 2002. One law will allow foreigners to acquire citizenship upon marriage to a citizen and the other offers citizenship to foreign-born persons who were living in Cote d’Ivoire before it became independent in 1960 and to foreign nationals born in Cote d’Ivoire between 1961 and 1973 and their children. Finally, there is the identity that is linked to the right to vote; Guinea-Bissau decided to issue its citizens new voter registration cards that will be “extremely difficult to forge or replicate” to reduce the possibility of electoral fraud.
All in all, August was a busy month, demonstrating once again the centrality of archives—paper, electronic, or audiovisual--in the world in which we live.
September: Preserving records of international justice
September 2013 was a big month for international justice: Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was confirmed guilty of war crimes during the war in Sierra Leone, 1991-2002, by the appeals panel of the Special Court for Sierra Leone; General Carlos Alberto Paz Figueroa was convicted in Peru for the forcible disappearance in 1990 of a professor; and in Guatemala the former national police chief Hector Bol de la Cruz was convicted of the forcible disappearance in 1984 of a student and labor leader. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison, Paz Figueroa to 15 years, and Bol de la Cruz to 40 years.
Archives are important in these cases, both the archives used in the trial by the prosecution and the defense attorneys and the archives created by the court during the case. Kate Doyle, who testified in the Bol de la Cruz trial, wrote, “The documents [of the National Police of Guatemala] were the most important evidence the prosecutors had." By contrast, in Peru’s case against Paz Figueroa the court relied heavily on oral testimony because, according to Jo-Marie Burt, who has written extensively on human rights prosecutions in Peru and elsewhere in the region, “in general the military routinely denies that any documents from the civil war period exist, even when prosecutors have obtained certain documents . . and when defendants bring documents to court to support their claims of innocence.” This makes the oral testimony entered in the trial record exceptionally important for future cases. And the trial record of the Taylor case is massive, providing an historical record both for Liberia, where he was president, and for Sierra Leone, where he fomented inhuman crimes.
An event that got much less press than these sensational cases was the report to the September session of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council by Pablo de Grieff, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. In his report, which focuses on truth commissions, de Grieff wrote that successful truth commissions “have provided recognition to victims as rights holders, fostered civic trust, and contributed to strengthening the rule of law.” Significantly for archivists, he pointed out the importance of archives for use by truth commissions and the archives of the truth commissions themselves. He encouraged “states to opt for archiving modalities that maximize access to all stakeholders, in compliance with the rights to privacy and personal security, convinced that the establishment of truth commission and national archives contribute in a substantial manner to realizing the right to truth and may further criminal prosecutions, reparation, and institutional and personnel reforms. Technological advances in archiving that allow for selected blocking of parts of documents should be utilized, and good practices gathered by expert bodies should be applied. The Special Rapporteur calls for the development of international standards on archiving and strongly supports such an initiative.”
The Special Rapporteur’s mandate extends beyond truth commissions, and de Grief emphasized that “truth cannot be a substitute for justice, reparation or guarantees of non-recurrence, singly or collectively” and that there are “abiding national and international obligations concerning each measure, compelling practical moral and political reasons for implementing them, as well as convincing empirical evidence that they work best, as justice measures, when designed and implemented in a comprehensive fashion rather than in isolation from one another.”
And that leads us back to the trials, international ones like the Taylor trial at the Special Court and national ones like those in Peru and Guatemala. While the records of defense attorneys often are private materials, the records of prosecutors and courts are government records. These are records of the highest importance, for the country and for international justice. Their preservation is a key national archival responsibility, one that is particularly challenging when parts of a case are conducted in closed session and when the records of the prosecutor include many pieces of evidence that lead to persons not indicted or charges not brought. Just as September was a good month for addressing gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law in three courts, we need to make sure that the following months see the prompt, professional archival management of these records—not only those of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the justice systems in Peru and Guatemala but also those of courts and cases like them throughout the world.
For articles about the Bol de la Cruz and Paz Figueroa cases, see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB440/ and http://rightsperu.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=37&Itemid=62; for the report of the Special Rapporteur, see A/HRC/24/42 http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session24/Pages/ListReports.aspx.
October: Preserving the Records of the International Crimes Tribunal, Bangladesh
In the back of the ballroom at the former British ambassador’s residence, an old man dressed in white slouched behind a low railing. At the front of the room, his black robe flapping listlessly, the man’s attorney argued to a panel of three judges, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, precedents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the principle that a person cannot be charged with a criminal offence for an action that was not a crime when you committed it (nullum crimen sine lege). Only a few visitors watched the proceedings from seats between the defendant in the back and the lawyers at the front. October 10, 2013, was an ordinary day in the extraordinary International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh.
The Tribunal was established in 2009 to investigate and prosecute persons who committed crimes against humanity, including genocide, during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. Previously a part of Pakistan following the end of British colonial rule in the subcontinent, the uneasy relationship between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was known then, led almost inevitably to an independence movement. The Pakistani Army tried to put down the revolt; at the end the Army withdrew to West Pakistan, taking with it many of the perpetrators who are outside the reach of today’s Tribunal. The prosecutors instead are focused on persons who collaborated with the Army in opposition to independence. The trials, the procedures, and the verdicts have all been controversial, both inside Bangladesh and in the international human rights community. Still, they continue.
Given the high importance of the trials within Bangladesh and the emotionally charged context in which they operate, it is essential to preserve scrupulously the records of the Tribunal. These include not just the records of the proceedings, which are relatively simple to protect and preserve, but also the records of the prosecutors, the registrar, and the judges in chambers. These are all records of the State, and the State has the responsibility to protect them and make them available for study, while preserving the rights of those whose lives are reflected in them. The records of the defense counsels--private records--should also be preserved, but here the State’s role is less direct. The State should ensure that the defense counsel are aware of their obligation to preserve the records of their participation in the trials and find a secure archives in which the records can be appropriately preserved.
A new book on the 1971 war in Bangladesh, Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, opens with a quotation from Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s 1978 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “[T]he bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, . . . and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.” It is essential that the records of these trials, like the records of the crimes that were committed, are not forgotten, not drowned out, but instead are preserved and protected in competent archival hands.
November: Destruction of Archives in Fear of Prosecution?
Does fear of prosecution lead to the destruction of archives? Intuition, of course, says yes, but news from several countries in November provided contradictory answers.
The most optimistic news came from Argentina, when an air force general told the defense minister who told the press that 1500 files from the period of the military junta (1976-1983) were stored in the basement of the Condor Building, which is the headquarters of the air force. (The building’s name eerily recalls “Operation Condor,” the secret alliance between Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina from 1975 to 1983 in which the security services of the members joined forces to track down and often assassinate people the governments considered “subversives.”) The defense minister explicitly recognized that the archives could have value for prosecutions, saying, “The courts will decide if this documentation that we have found contains, aside from historical value, a judicial value for the various cases that are taking place in distinct Argentine jurisdictions.” And the director of Memoria Abierta, an important Argentine human rights organization, told the Buenos Aires Herald, “Until now, archives were not provided voluntarily . . . they spent decades in demolished basements, without anyone knowing . . . this demonstrates a change of spirit.”
Much more somber news came from El Salvador. In 1992, combatants in El Salvador signed Peace Accords ending twelve years of civil war. The next year the government passed the General Amnesty Law, protecting military commanders from being prosecuted for crimes committed during the war. Beginning during the civil war Tutela Legal, the legal and human rights office of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, set about documenting human rights abuses, including massacres, killings and war crimes, amassing by 2013 an archives of 50,000 cases. Pro-Busqueda was founded in 1994 as a nongovernmental organization devoted to locating children who disappeared during the war, amassing 1200 cases with DNA test results, adoption records and related documents; the “vast majority” of the cases of disappearance implicate state actors. Eventually Pro-Busqueda and Tutela Legal bought cases of human rights violations to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in 2012 in the Pro-Busqueda case said the amnesty law violated an international treaty. On September 20 of this year the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of El Salvador agreed to hear arguments about the constitutionality of the amnesty law. What happened next? On September 30 the archbishop of San Salvador abruptly closed Tutela Legal. On November 14 armed men broke into the offices of Pro-Busqueda, stole computers and burned the archives.
The final example comes from the United Kingdom, where newly released records from the former Colonial Office show in heart-breaking detail the massive destruction of records as the United Kingdom was withdrawing from the soon-to-be-independent colonies. According to The Guardian, in 1961 the colonial secretary instructed the colonial administrations that the new governments “should not be handed any material that ‘might embarrass Her Majesty’s government,’ that could ‘embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers,’ that might betray intelligence sources, or that might ‘be used unethically by ministers in the successor government.’” The records include “destruction certificates” that prove the colonial officials obeyed to the directive. Fortunately, some colonies did not destroy massive quantities of records, with the Kenya office declaring, “It is better for too much, rather than too little, to be sent home—the wholesale destruction, as in Malaya, should not be repeated.”
What are we to make of this? That individuals taking responsibility make a difference: they confirm the existence of records, do not follow orders to destroy records, demand that records related to human rights be preserved for use. As Principle 14 of the United Nations’ Updated Set of Principles against Impunity says, “The right to know implies that archives should be preserved. Technical measures and penalties shall be applied to prevent any removal, destruction, concealment or falsification of archives, especially for the purpose of ensuring the impunity of perpetrators of violations of human rights and/or humanitarian law.”
And now can anyone tell us of the fate of archives within Syria?
December: 2013 in Review
A look back on a variety of stories of the past year:
January: The Philippine Congress passed legislation awarding compensation to thousands of victims of human rights abuses under Ferdinand Marcos’ 20-year rule; claimants are required to provide documentary proof of their injuries.
February. Ireland released a report concluding that records show “significant state involvement” in the incarceration between 1922 and 1996 of women and girls in workhouses operated by the Catholic Church known as “Magdalen laundries.”
March. UNICEF released a report estimating that 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17 are arrested, interrogated and detained each year in the occupied West Bank by military, police and security agents.
April. The Diversityworks Trust of New Zealand is developing an online national archives of film and video material relating to the New Zealand deaf community.
May. Stasi records reveal that pharmaceutical companies from West Germany and other Western countries tested new drugs on unsuspecting East Germans.
June. Edward Snowden revealed the massive data collection activities of the U.S. National Security Agency.
July. Hissenne Habre, the former dictator of Chad, was arrested and brought before the special court set up in Senegal to try him; he will face evidence from his own records that were found by Human Rights Watch in 1990 after Habre was deposed.
August. Long-lost medical records of the world’s first recognized radiation sickness patient were recovered 68 years after the victim died within weeks of being exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima; the records apparently had been taken home by an employee of the hospital where she was treated.
September. Details of nearly 5000 persons killed by the Afghan Communist government in 1978 and 1979 were released on the web site of the Netherlands national prosecutor’s office; the information came from a deceased United Nations Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan.
September-October-November. On September 30 the Archbishop of San Salvador abruptly closed the office of Tutela Legal, its legal office that had very significant documentation on human rights abuses in the country. Protests followed in October. Then in November armed men broke into the office of Pro-Busqueda, a nongovernmental organization that works to locate children missing from El Salvador’s 1980s civil war; they set fire to the archives, destroying about 80% of them, and stole the computers.
November. Switzerland passed a law allowing it to provide “safe haven” for endangered cultural materials, including archives, from other countries.
December. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights announced that there is massive evidence of human rights violations by all parties including the government of Syria.
These are only a sample of the archives and human rights stories, positive and negative, from 2013. Every part of the world provided news items, and all types of institutions—government, business, religious bodies, educational institutions, civic organizations—were involved.
Thank you to all who provided news and suggestions this past year. Thank you, too, to the compilers of news stories and bloggers; this monthly summary would not be possible without you. And finally a big thank you to all the journalists who provide the reporting that allows us to know and to react to the events in our imperfect world.