ICA SAHR – Saving the Archives of the Temporary International Criminal Tribunals

Trudy Peterson, Elisabeth Baumgartner and Lisa Ott will present an overview of the issue and explore future perspectives. During the past 30 years, six temporary international criminal tribunals were established and these, except the Kosovo court, have or are closing. All have created massive bodies of records which are important to future understandings of the conflicts and to the history of the development of international justice. Meanwhile, new institutions tasked to collect information, like the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria and the OHCHR Accountability Project for Sri Lanka have been created in recent years. Yet the long-term future of the records of these courts and mechanisms is uncertain. Three are in various spaces in The Hague; the Rwanda court records are in Arusha, Tanzania, and the Cambodian records are in Phnom Penh. The records of the mechanisms created by the Human Rights Council are in Geneva, records linked to the United Nations in New York are located there. No long-term archival solution is in place. While the UN archives is often the automatic place for archival custody, this requires extensive facilities, resources and experience in handling the records of courts, prosecutors, and investigators which have continuing legal demands.