Syria’s truth smugglers
“What we’ll do is take these activists – young, enthusiastic, self-appointed, social-media-savvy, with considerable personal courage – and we’ll sensitise them to the sort of evidence that is required to inform an international criminal case, so they’re not running around collecting stuff that’s of no use for a criminal process.”
.. He pointed out that the first witness called at the Nuremberg trials was the Third Reich’s state archivist, and he showed me a graphic to illustrate his approach.
.. Syria represents a near-ideal case study for a paper-driven approach.
“It is highly bureaucratised,” he said. “It generates an awful lot of paper, because it is a culture in which decision-making by subordinates is implicitly discouraged, so people are forever reporting upwards, trying to get others to take responsibility for decision making, and covering their ass … that produces paper.”
.. When Adel and his investigators come across a cache of abandoned documents, they must make an assessment of their overall significance, but they are not supposed to winnow out individual pages in search of an elusive “smoking gun” memo. This is partly to prevent the exclusion of potentially exculpatory evidence, and therefore to pre‑empt possible procedural objections from the defence in any future trial. But ostensibly mundane documents often prove to be the most damning.