Friday, August 21, 2020

Getting and keeping evidence on the battlefield for later trials

Just Security reports,

In December 2019 the United Nations Counter Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), with the support of the traditional alphabet soup of other U.N. organizations focused on counter-terrorism, promulgated their “Guidelines to facilitate the use and admissibility of evidence in national criminal courts of information collected, handled, preserved and shared by the military to prosecute terrorist offences.” The (perhaps overly ambitious) objective of the Guidelines is to provide “a broad range of relevant stakeholders” information on how to address questions of admissibility that arise in conflict or post-conflict situations (p. 6). It has to be said though that there seems to be a rather large focus on the military, who are not usually trained criminal investigators, and not ideally suited to take the lead on roles such as evidence collection.

From Robert Cryer, The UN Guidelines on "Battlefield" Evidence and Terrorist Offences: A Frame, a Monet, or a Patchwork? 12 August 2020.

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