Perpetrators of serious human rights violations do not always leave paper trails evidencing their actions but when they do, this can be used to seek redress for their crimes through a variety of means. For example, they can support the claims made in reports or other publications to raise public awareness. The information can also be used to assess whether national authorities are fulfilling their obligations to respect human rights and to prevent and investigate alleged abuses. And they could be presented to criminal investigators as potential evidence to be used in court. Where such records exist (such as in many of the cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia), courts and tribunals rely extensively on documentary evidence when deciding on criminal responsibility for serious human rights violations.75 Whatever the purpose of the documentation effort, the primary goal is to create an: (i) accurate; (ii) reliable; and (iii) precise record of events. 76 Judicial mechanisms, for example, require a high and technical standard of proof to determine accountability. If not properly collected, the gathered documentation is unlikely to be usable in pursuit of legal redress. Even if documents are not collected with the intent of using them in pursuit of legal redress, it is advised to take into account the high standards of proof that are required by judicial mechanisms while gathering information. This allows potential use in judicial proceedings should it come to this, but is also important for non-judicial means. For example, it allows for well-founded allegations rather than suffer from attacks on its probative value. Documentary information that is collected and relied upon needs to be accurate, reliable and credible in order substantiate any successful attempt at seeking redress. Important concepts used to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, and credibility of documentary information are their probative value, source and context. Probative Value Judicial mechanisms determine the weight of documents presented in court based on their probative value. The probative value of a piece of information is a legal concept used to describe the extent to which a piece of information tends to prove something material, usually in the context of a 75 Marie Nystedt (Ed.), Christian Axboe Nielsen, Jann F. Kleffner, A Handbook On Assisting International Criminal Investigations, THE FOLKE BERNADOTTE ACADEMY, 54 (2011). 76 Camille Giffard, THE TORTURE REPORTING HANDBOOK, 30 (2000), available at http://www.essex.ac.uk/torturehandbook/handbook(english).pdf. 60