War Crimes Documentation Project

Name of Organization
Geographical Scope
Type of Initiatives:
Regions:
  • Africa
  • Europe and CIS
Country:
  • Sierra Leone
  • Kosovo - UN Administered Territory under UNSC 1244
Purpose
The War Crimes Documentation Project encompasses citizen interviews, outreach efforts, and local skills transfer, with the goal of aiding the investigation and prosecution of war crimes, and increasing public awareness of war crimes, their prosecution, and the role of accountability mechanisms.
 
In Kosovo, the War Crimes Documentation Project and its partner NGOs conducted more than 2,000 interviews with Kosovar refugees in Albania, Kosovo and the United States. It joined forces with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to analyze the patterns of abuses described in the interviews and published the results in a groundbreaking report, Political Killings in Kosova/Kosovo March
June 1999.
 
Expanding the pool of interviews enabled the War Crimes Documentation Project and AAAS to perform more rigorous statistical analysis and reach stronger conclusions. In January 2002, CEELI and AAAS submitted an expert report, Killing and Refugee Flow in Kosovo March
June 1999, to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) legal team prosecuting former President Slobodan Milosevic. Collecting refugee accounts quickly and accurately was essential for future prosecution of perpetrators by the ICTY .
 
In Sierra Leone the War Crimes Documentation Project includes work in three distinct areas:
 
  1. Data Collection and Analysis: CEELI believes that the collection and quantitative analysis of war crimes and human rights violation data can yield results directly useful to Sierra Leone's accountability mechanisms. Thus, CEELI is capitalizing on its experience mounting similar interviewing projects in Kosovo to select, train, and field teams of interviewers to collect additional data to contribute to such an analysis. In addition, CEELI is supporting data collection by domestic organizations to provide additional sources of information thereby generating more comprehensive analysis and reporting.
     
  2. Assistance to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is making use of the Analyzer database technology, developed by CEELI and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (http://shr.aaas.org/hrdag/), to facilitate quantitative analysis of the information collected by the TRC.

    However, before interview data can become a statistically valid picture of events it must be "coded," that is raw narrative data must be reduced to component parts, including the numbers and types of violations. The Analyzer database is designed to assist with this effort, but the human decision making element cannot be completely eliminated by technology. Coding is an integral element of the data processing and must be done correctly and consistently to produce good data. As such, CEELI is working with HRDAG to select, train, and second "coders" to the TRC to complete its data coding effort.

    CEELI is also supporting the participation of statisticians to assist TRC staff in incorporating statistical analysis of abuses into the TRC final report.
     

  3. Assistance to the Special Court: Accountability mechanisms only succeed if they gain the support and trust of local institutions and the local community. The more local legal professionals are able to participate in the work of these bodies, the more the local community will have faith in the outcomes. As such, ABA/CEELI is providing a subgrant to the Sierra Leone Bar Association to fund an internship program for Sierra Leonean legal professionals to gain valuable work experience with the Special Court.
Area of Governance
Conflict
Website of initiative
Publications
Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo: March - June 1999, A Report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (January 2002) http://shr.aaas.org/pubs/detail.php?p_id=73 Political Killings in Kosova/Kosovo: March-June 1999 (October 2000) http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/pk/ and others on the initiative's WEB site
Source of Data
Using a combination of own and existing data
Type of Data Collection
Events registration
Random sample population survey
Secondary sources
specifications of type of data collection
Kosovo Project Scope Interviews and Data Collection:
  1. Recognizing the urgency of the situation and the value of indigenous efforts, CEELI forged an alliance with a coalition of Albanian NGOs, which came together as the Center for Peace Through Justice, to collect witness information.
  2. The CEELI War Crimes Documentation Project and its partner NGOs conducted more than 2,000 interviews with Kosovar refugees in Albania, Kosovo and the United States. It joined forces with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to analyze the patterns of abuses described in the interviews.
  3. Expanding the pool of interviews enabled the CEELI War Crimes Documentation Project and AAAS to perform more rigorous statistical analysis and reach stronger conclusions.
Measurement Methods / Tools Generated or Used
Innovative Database Technology Compiling statistically sound data from the vast quantity of interviews conducted by the CEELI War Crimes Documentation Project and its partner organizations required a new generation of database technology.
 
Working in partnership with Dr. Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), CEELI created Analyzer, a new program for processing war crimes and human rights violation data gathered by multiple NGOs.
 
Collecting evidence of war crimes from a population recovering from brutal events is a difficult and potentially traumatic process. CEELI and its partner organizations have therefore designed a set of protocols for collecting data intended for the database. These protocols address issues such as ensuring data security; guaranteeing the impartiality of the process; and avoiding inflicting additional trauma on victims and witnesses.
List of Indicators

Main Outcomes (Products)

Main Users
International agencies
Policy makers
How to

Areas of Governance

Country Initiatives

Regional Initiatives

Global Initiatives

UNDP Support