On 5 October, at its 63rd session, the Human Rights Council adopted “Responding to the human rights and humanitarian crisis caused by the ongoing armed conflict in the Sudan”, by 28 votes to 10 with 9 abstentions.
Paragraph 20 reads:
Encourages the preservation of evidence, including the systematic documentation of casualties, and stresses in this regard the importance of evidence preservation for the purposes of accountability, including future remedies and reparations
Six of those words are the ones this field has spent years asking for: including the systematic documentation of casualties.
Take them apart. Systematic separates documentation that is designed, continuous and methodologically consistent from documentation that happens wherever somebody happened to be looking. Documentation of casualties means a record of the people killed, not a record of incidents, not a tally of violation types; the difference between establishing who was killed and establishing how many is the difference between a record and a number. And then the paragraph attaches that work to remedies and reparations, which is a statement about the future.
Casualty records are fundamental to reparations programmes, but too often overlooked. To be effective, these programmes need to know who and what they are compensating. They need names, with dates and places and circumstances attached. This is not something that can be assembled retrospectively from estimates. Somebody has to have written each entry down at the time, under conditions that will survive challenge years later in a room none of them will be in.
It is worth considering how a paragraph like this achieves its effect. The verb is “encourages”. It compels nobody, creates no mechanism and carries no money. What it creates is agreed language, and agreed language is the working currency of these institutions. A mandate-holder designing a workplan can cite it. An official arguing for a line of funding can cite it. The next drafter, looking for a precedent, finds the phrase already accepted by States and reaches for it rather than inventing one. Text that is adopted is harder to argue out later. This is how a field gets built into the architecture of international crisis response, one agreed phrase at a time. It is slow precisely because it is durable.
Casualty recording first reached Council texts in 2020, in three resolutions: on Myanmar, on the Syrian Arab Republic, and on the prevention of genocide. Those tied it to the right to an effective remedy, to the search for the missing, and to the prevention of denial. This latest resolution now links it directly to the obligations of all actors in the conflict in Sudan.
This wording did not appear in the resolution by itself. It was added thanks to collaboration between Every Casualty Counts and supportive UN member states who argued for its inclusion. They see the importance of building the evidence and preserving the truth, and Every Casualty Counts – together with Network members – give them the facts and analysis they need to make the case.
On the IIFFM’s mandate, the Council went the other way. The IIFFM was renewed for one year, not the two that 68 organisations requested in August. Edition 4 set out the evidentiary case for a longer horizon: verification is slow, and a body building a case file for prosecutions that may not open for years cannot plan in twelve-month instalments. That case has not weakened and we will put it again next October. Meanwhile the IIFFM has its year, and the resolution it now works under names the systematic documentation of casualties as part of preserving evidence.
