Documentation and Accountability work
«For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.»
Elie Wiesel
«My hope is that we’ll see our documentation and accountability work grow and keep making a difference in the lives of victims of grave abuses and to honor the memory of victims no longer with us. To avoid future atrocities, we must ensure that clear precedents are set today.»
Lene Wetteland, head of the Documentation & Accountability Hub
Much of what the NHC is truly about crosses paths in our documentation and accountability work. We are preserving facts and memory of past events and monitoring abuses in the present, clearing the path for justice in the future. In short, we document human rights abuses, honour the memories of the victims, and ensure that the responsible can be held to account.
The Natalia Estemirova Documentation Center was created in 2012, to use the I-DOC data base for documentation and analysis of grave human rights violations during the conflicts in Chechnya. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the documentation methodology and the I-DOC database has been used by the over 30 member organisations of the Ukrainian 5 A.M. Coalition. These organisations benefit from regular capacity building and exchange with the NHC’s Documentation and Accountability Hub (DAH) on documentation and case building based on the material in the database. The material describes, according to strict criteria, the circumstances of potential war crimes, testimonies, audiovisual material, available documents, and other kinds of evidence, including from open sources.
In 2023, DAH, based on this methodology submitted several sanction briefs to the European Union, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The sanction briefs are comprehensive case files describing a serious human rights violation or potential war crime and why the alleged perpetrator, as identified in detail in the brief, should be put on a given state’s sanction list. The hub prepared universal jurisdiction dossiers and submissions to institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). Here, substantial material is presented so that proceedings can be initiated against an alleged perpetrator outside the territory where the incident took place. DAH also provided input to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine and other UN mechanisms, such as the UN Office of the High Commissioner examination of the situation in Belarus (OEB).
The Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR) is one of the most active organisations in cooperation with the DAH. One of many highlights of the year was when they visited Norway together with former civilian hostages and relatives of current hostages. Their testimonies made a deep and lasting impression on everyone who took the time to listen and read their report published on the eve of their visit to Oslo.
It meant a lot to everyone involved in the documentation work when, in November 2023, DAH’s project Justice for Victims in Ukraine was selected among hundreds of global projects to be part of the Paris Peace Forum’s Scale-Up program for the following year. As part of the program, two experienced professionals in the relevant field provide tailormade mentorship for the DAH to ‘scale up’ the Ukraine project.