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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This Handbook has been prepared by the Netherlands Office of the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG) in response to various requests from our clients to provide advice on whether and how to act when serious human rights violations occur and no professional or reliable investigators are present to document the occurrences. The project started in 2013 and is based on PILPG’s fieldwork experiences and collaboration with civil society organizations around the world, our work on international and domestic justice and accountability processes, and expert consultations with individuals and institutions in the fields of law, forensic science, technology and criminal investigations. Under the Co-Directors of the Netherlands Office, Dr. Marieke de Hoon and Dr. Brianne McGonigle Leyh, this project was coordinated by Federica D’Alessandra, with the assistance of Sander Couch, Julie Fraser, Ilina Georgieva and Jolien Quispel. We are grateful to the Hague Institute of Global Justice for hosting our experts roundtable in October 2015, and to all organizations and experts that have contributed with feedback to our drafts, including legal practitioners, investigators, security and technology experts affiliated with WITNESS, the IBA eyeWitness to Atrocity project, Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Foro Penal Venezoelano, the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Netherlands Forensic Institute, and scholars at Harvard Law School. We are also grateful to the organizations partnering with PILPG in the Human Rights Documentation Toolkit consortium and to our partners in the field for their ongoing cooperation, and to the Expert-Group on Fact Finding and Accountability, the Individualization of War project and the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict for offering the space to test these guidelines among various experts and practitioners. The authors of this Handbook have also benefitted from consultation with and feedback from members of the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor. Due to security concerns in some cases, non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements in others, not all contributions can hereby be disclosed, but our gratitude extends to all. This project could not have been produced without the excellent research and drafting of PILPG Research Associates, the support of the two academic partners of PILPG in the Netherlands, Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam) and Utrecht University, and of the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy in the United States. We thank them for their many years of collaboration and facilitation of our work. 4

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PILPG Handbook on Civil Society Documentation of Serious Human Rights Violations Sept 2016

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Documentation Purpose

Perpetrator-centred documentation

Topic(s)

Data/Information Strategy
Preservation and Archiving
Verification

Type

Guide

Description: Increasingly, civil society actors engage in documentation and investigation processes, seeking to collect evidence against those responsible for serious human rights violations. The purpose of this Handbook is to provide guidelines and best practices for the collection and management of information on serious human rights situations for those that are not professionally trained in such documentation practices. While the Handbook strongly emphasizes the need to refrain from investigating human rights abuses and to refer to professionals, practice shows that this is not always possible. Only under such circumstances and as a last resort may civil society actors consider engaging in certain documentation practices and not in others, always seeking to include professionals when and where possible. They may however only do so by adhering to the ethical principles and documentation guidelines that are provided in this Handbook. These enable unofficial investigators to do no harm, identify security risks, preserve crime scenes, prevent the loss of evidence, and manage the information in manner that preserves confidentiality, security and probative value, with an eye to possible use in later redress processes and without jeopardizing the future work of professionally trained and officially appointed investigators.

Primary Documents

PILPG_Handbook_on_Civil_Society_Documentation_of_Serious_Human_Rights_Violations_Sept_2016_tcm289-785328.pdf
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PILPG Handbook on Civil Society Documentation of Serious Human Rights Violations Sept 2016

Primary Documents

Verification Handbook

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