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Non-governmental
organizations are increasingly taking it upon themselves
to assist in documenting war crimes.
Although the United Nations has created several special
tribunals to prosecute war crimes around the world, it
has not always come up with the necessary funding and
personnel to support war crimes investigations. Thus,
a variety of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have
begun to assist in the documentation of violations of
international humanitarian law.
Physicians
for Human Rights (PHR) has monitored human rights violations
in more than 20 countries worldwide and made their information
available to war crimes investigators in Croatia, Bosnia,
and Rwanda. In all of these countries, PHR undertook detailed
exhumations of suspected mass graves; in Vukovar, they
amassed evidence which helped lead to the indictment of
the Yugoslav Army officers. In Sanski Most and areas around
Srebrenica, they organized exhumations in an effort to
support the activities of the UN tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY). In addition, PHR established an antemortem
database and collected information of missing persons
from their relatives. These activities, combined with
educational and other local capacity initiatives, assisted
the Bosnian medical authorities in dealing with the identification
of those persons who fell victim to grave violations of
humanitarian law and who have been missing for more than
five years.
In Sierra Leone, No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) has been
active in providing legal advice and support to the Government
of Sierra Leone as it formulates the Special Court to
try those persons accused of grave violations of humanitarian
law in the territory of Sierra Leone. As part of the NPWJ
Judicial Assistance Program, legal experts at the United
Nations in New York and at the Field Mission in Sierra
Leone have assisted in negotiating the proposed legal
statutes for this Court, the first of its kind in West
Africa
By
far the most extensive support from NGOs in war crimes
documentation took place in Kosovo, where the International
Crisis Group (ICG) was specifically tasked with the field
documentation of war crimes.The methodology, structure,
and goals of the ICG Humanitarian Law Documentation Project
set a new precedent for war crime documentation work.
Its mission was comprised of some 46 international and
123 local staff operating in Kosovo and Albania for seven
months between May and December 1999. ICG researchers
collected some 4,700 witness statements on a CD ROM database
and forwarded to the ICTY in Prishtina and the Hague.
This searchable database gave the ICTY an extensive list
of witnesses as well as information on the types of crimes
alleged.
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