The UNITAD Mission in Iraq (DIIS Talking Points 3)
Copenhagen, 17 September 2024
This research note is part of a series on evidence controls and digital technologies. The series develops points raised in a talk at the Danish Institute for International Studies event. The research is now being developed as part of a larger project on information and communications technology.
The UN Investigative Team for the Accounting of Daesh (UNITAD) was established through UN Security Council Resolution 2379 to collect and preserve evidence of Daesh / ISIL crimes in Iraq, with a focus on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Its work highlights the complexities of preserving battlefield evidence and ensuring its digital availability for legal and historical purposes. UNITAD’s mandate ended in 2024, but the digital evidence it collected will remain a key referent for future legal proceedings and historical analysis. Continued accessibility and proper contextualization will remain an ongoing challenge.
Some initial points:
The relevance debate: UNITAD privileged legal and prosecutorial investigation, which privileges provable and achievable lines of inquiry, at the expensive of truly comprehensive fact finding and evidence collection. Evidence collection was selective, focused on prosecutable cases rather than a complete or comprehensive record of events.
Digitization as construct: UNITAD faced hurdles in ensuring data integrity, secure storage, and future access to the evidence it gathered. One of its best funded and most ambitious projects was mass digitization of paper-based evidence. In practice this focused primarily on modernization of the judicial process through digitization of criminal case files held by the courts, rather than digital preservation of real evidence.
Gaps in documentation: As researchers begin accessing UNITAD records, questions will inevitably arise on a range of issues. Among them: the provenance of digitized materials, the disposition of original materials, the role of the best evidence rule and hearsay rule in assessing the court admissibility of documentary evidence, and whether critical pieces of historical evidence were overlooked or disregarded.
Accepting archival incompleteness: Previous documentation efforts in relation to the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria, and the much broader realm of fact-finding missions and commissions of inquiry, demonstrate that archival holdings and repositories are never truly comprehensive or complete. Instead, they represent evidence selected for retention, and evidence selected for disposal. This inherent incompleteness, however, should be a condition arrived at soberly, competently, and expertly.
--
Author Bio: Dr. Michael A. Innes is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he founded and directs the Conflict Records Unit. He maintains an active consultancy portfolio as managing director and lead consultant at Craighead Kellas SAAR.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Dr. Matthew Ford at the Swedish Defence University, Dr. Jethro Norman at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and Professor Myrjam de Brujn at Leiden University. Their publications and arguments on Ukraine, Mali, and digital technology impacts directly inform corresponding elements of this research note.
Author Declaration: This research note summarises unfunded research conducted independently by the author. A variety of tools including generative AI were used to track references, collate notes, summarise findings, and suggest an overall report structure. The author manually drafted this research note in its entirety.