and widespread violence, professional investigators are often precluded access to crime scenes, or cannot be deployed in the immediate aftermath of an attack, resulting in local actors having the ability to access information about human rights violations; that unofficial investigators may lack the training and/or resources to properly handle information they might enter into contact with; and that contamination or loss of important information is often the unfortunate outcome of such circumstances, this Handbook assembles a series of guidelines and best practices on how to recognize, collect, manage and store information on serious human rights violations. The novelty of this Handbook is that it constitutes the first comprehensive collection of standards and best practices for the investigation of serious human rights violations by civil society actors that are: 1) neither mainly addressed to human-rights mandated actors (whether officially mandated, like the Training Manual on Human Rights Monitoring of the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or unofficially, as it is the case with training materials circulated by human rights groups to their researchers before deploying into the field); 2) nor crimes specific (as it is the case with the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict, or the Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, also known as the Istanbul Protocol). 1.3 Audience This Handbook is primarily intended as a guide for members of civil society groups that, although not as primary organizational objective, nevertheless engage in information-gathering exercises for the purpose of unofficially documenting serious human rights violations. This includes, for example, staff of local and international non-governmental organizations that do not have documentation of human rights violations as their primary objective. This Handbook is not intended for civil-society groups or personnel of non-governmental organizations whose primary purpose is to document human rights violations. We assume that these actors will receive in-house training on the best practices followed by their organizations, tailored to their abilities and needs. The Handbook might however provide a useful tool for them as well, as it will present the collection of best practices in a manner that is not intended for the purposes of internal training only. 14