Since ECC was established, we have supported organisations around the world to document fatalities due to armed conflict and mass human rights abuses. Many of these organisations are locally based and record the impact of violence on their own communities. Sometimes, the casualties they document are their own colleagues, friends and family.
Inspired by the many powerful memorialisation initiatives taking place in conflict-affected and post-conflict communities globally, ECC is developing a global memorial project to acknowledge all those who lost their lives to armed conflict or violence throughout 2024.
“Every person who died has the right to be remembered, and their families deserve just satisfaction. If the circumstances of their deaths are withheld, they die twice – both physically and on paper.” Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union
The Memorial 2025 project aims to break away from the common presentation of victims of war as stereotypes and statistics, and it will instead present the casualties as unique individuals whose life was cut short. We aim to change the way that the human cost of armed conflict is portrayed in the UK media and public discourse to challenge the default assumption that military action entailing mass killing is both unavoidable and acceptable.
This project will also help to improve the standard of casualty recording practices worldwide, by requiring all research contributors to meet rigorous quality control requirements. This will help embed a transparent, consistent minimum standard across the field of casualty recording, thereby improving the credibility of casualty recorders’ work. Increased public trust in how conflict fatalities are documented will make it harder for political actors and news media to dismiss information on civilian deaths as unreliable or ‘propaganda’.
This project will produce, distribute and promote a report that documents 2024 through the stories of individual victims of armed conflict. Working with members of the Casualty Recorders Network, we are compiling the stories of individual victims from across the globe to honour and preserve their memory. The Memorial 2025 project will bring together separate narratives to focus on the shared humanity and suffering of all those affected by armed violence.
ECC is uniquely positioned to produce this report because we convene a global network of 66 casualty recording organisations. Individually, these organisations publish information about the deceased in various formats and this project will be the first attempt to compile this information to create a global memorial report.
We hope that these stories will be shared widely and used to educate people on the reality of armed conflict today. In countries such as the UK, where most of the population has never experienced direct armed conflict, memorialisation and remembrance initiatives can inadvertently imply that war is a thing relegated to the past. We want to challenge that comforting misapprehension and emphasise the fact that the horror of war is still a daily reality around the world and that it destroys the lives of people just like us.
If you would like to learn more about this project, to get involved, or to support in other ways, please contact .
