Our Clarifying Moment: A Global Call To Action
Prevent and Document War Crimes and Atrocities
Documentation of human rights violations and atrocity crimes during active conflict is critical to advance accountability. The gathering and submission of real-time evidence in Ukraine will play a vital role in the outcome of the proceedings at the ICC, ICJ, and domestic courts. Reports by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine released in October 2022, March 2023, and October 2023 outlined evidence that Russian authorities “committed a wide range of violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in many regions of Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Many of these amount to war crimes and include wilful killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape, and forced transfers and deportations of children.” However, partners on the ground, particularly law enforcement and civil society, require the resources necessary to gather, document, and protect evidence. Perhaps even more critically, there must be significantly more coordination, transparency, and burden-sharing amongst the numerous international, national, and civil society investigatory groups.
Immediate actions needed:
The international community must provide technical and financial support to the Ukrainian legal system, including training investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, law enforcement, and civil society to effectively collect evidence, coordinate, and conduct proceedings for war crimes and other international crimes in line with international law and best practices. Specific support, training, and advice should be given to law enforcement to enhance their forensic capacities relating to the collection of evidence of atrocities and mass graves.
Governments, donors, multilateral institutions, civil society, and individuals should disseminate resources (in English and Ukrainian) that provide guidance and capacity-building and technical guidance for civil society organizations and individuals to document human rights violations and atrocity crimes in Ukraine.
These actors should also share mobile apps, digital platforms, and other resources with Ukrainians and partners on-the-ground to capture, store, and preserve evidence of human rights violations and atrocity crimes and ensure the security of witnesses, victims, and investigators.
Individuals and organizations documenting and collecting evidence should highlight the disproportionate impacts of conflict and international crimes experienced by women, children, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities, particularly the use of rape as a weapon of war.
All interviews, investigations, and evidence collection must be completed in a gender-sensitive manner. A lack of gender lens in these investigations can lead to the experiences of women, LGBTQ+, and other groups being ignored or overlooked. All interviews, investigations, and evidence collection must also take into account conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against men and boys. Donors, governments, and multilateral institutions must train their staff to incorporate a gender-sensitive perspective into their work.
Donors must invest in proper cataloging, storage, and analysis of images and documents to ensure their viability for international justice and accountability proceedings and support key non-governmental organizations and collaborations, such as the 5am Coalition. While funding must advance the use of technological tools to sort materials, support for human analysis is also essential. Security of digitally-stored evidence is vital to avoid manipulation, contamination, and destruction of evidence by the Russians and other nefarious actors.
Governments, donors, and multilateral institutions must efficiently and consistently coordinate their atrocities investigations to avoid duplicating efforts, ensure evidence preservation, and prevent the re-traumatization of survivors and their families.
Donors should utilize efforts to collect evidence in Ukraine to refine best practices and standards that can be scaled in other conflict- and atrocities-affected contexts.