On 16 May 2023, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) delivered a landmark assessment to the Human Rights Council: casualty recording is “an important and effective means of delivering on a range of fundamental human rights.”
The report, Impact of casualty recording on the promotion and protection of human rights (A/HRC/53/48), was mandated by Human Rights Council resolution 50/11 and prepared for the Council’s fifty-third session. It is the most authoritative statement the UN human rights system has yet made on why this work matters, and it draws directly on the field that Every Casualty Counts and the Casualty Recorders Network have spent over a decade building.
The record shows where the evidence came from
In setting out how it prepared the report, OHCHR names those whose input it drew upon: States, United Nations entities, national human rights institutions, academia, independent experts, and “civil society organizations (particularly members of the Casualty Recorders Network, coordinated by Every Casualty Counts).” More than 50 respondents who have been documenting casualties over many years, in difficult and often dangerous conditions, submitted evidence.
That evidence base did not assemble itself. Ahead of the deadline, Every Casualty Counts made its own submission and coordinated members of the Casualty Recorders Network and other casualty recording initiatives to submit their own. Those submissions reflected the experience of organisations working across the globe, from Ethiopia and Somalia to Haiti, Pakistan, Honduras and Ukraine, including the Amhara Association of America, Airwars, Action on Armed Violence, Défenseurs Plus, Omaria, the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, the Somali Human Rights Association, the Tigray War Project at Ghent University, and the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. The report cites this work throughout.
The recommendations rest on the Standards
The report closes with a set of recommendations to States, to armed actors, to the Human Rights Council, and to casualty recorders themselves. Among them, the High Commissioner recommends that recorders “collaborate to further develop and implement internationally agreed definitions, principles and standards of casualty recording.”
The report is explicit about what that work builds upon: the OHCHR Guidance on Casualty Recording and Every Casualty Counts’ Standards for Casualty Recording. A recommendation issued by the UN’s highest human rights official, to a global field, is grounded in the framework we authored.
The report is explicit about what that work builds upon: the OHCHR Guidance on Casualty Recording and Every Casualty Counts’ Standards for Casualty Recording.
What “not just numbers” means in practice
Two of the report’s conclusions read as an affirmation of principles that have guided this work from the beginning.
The first conclusion: “Casualty records are not just numbers. They represent human beings whose lives were torn apart by conflicts and violence.”
The submissions behind the report show what that means in practice. The Kosovo Memory Book documents the names and circumstances of death or disappearance of 13,535 people lost in the conflict in Kosovo, listed not by ethnicity or allegiance but by objective criteria, so that recognition extends to everyone. Lost Lives memorialises more than 3,700 named individuals killed during the conflict in and over Northern Ireland. These are not abstractions. They are records built one person at a time.
The second conclusion: “Casualty recorders are human rights defenders who often work in very difficult circumstances.” The report goes on to insist that their work must be “supported politically and in terms of resources,” and that access to affected areas is critical.
These are not our words in the report. They are the UN High Commissioner’s. That the field’s own convictions are now reflected in a formal report to the Human Rights Council is a measure of how far the case for casualty recording has travelled.
Why this matters
The report does not resolve the hardest questions, and it does not claim to. It documents impact across protection, accountability, reparations, early warning and access to services, while recognising that the ultimate effect of this work depends on the willingness of those causing harm to engage with it.
What it does establish is a shared, official foundation. States now have a clear recommendation to put casualty recording systems in place and to make use of the data. Recorders have recognition of the risk they carry and the value of what they produce. And the field has, on the record, an internationally agreed point of reference in the Standards for Casualty Recording.
Every life lost to armed violence must be recorded, recognised and remembered. This report brings that principle a measurable step closer to being shared by the institutions with the power to act on it.
The full report is available as UN document A/HRC/53/48, Impact of casualty recording on the promotion and protection of human rights. Read more about the joint submission from Casualty Recorders Network members.
