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