On 12 October, at the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee’s general debate on a convention on crimes against humanity, 43 organisations and 52 individuals signed a statement from the Coalition for a Crimes against Humanity Convention. Every Casualty Counts is among them.
The statement is about who gets into the room. The first Preparatory Committee agreed to open the future negotiating conference to organisations without consultative status at ECOSOC, and the statement asks States and the Secretariat to make that decision mean something: requests to participate accepted in good time, observers able to attend and address formal meetings and submit materials, delegations able to appear in person without limits on their size. It also asks States to consult victims and survivors on how they wish to be engaged, and – crucially – to fund that engagement to make it possible.
As the draft articles stand, this convention contains no express obligation towards the dead. A treaty on crimes against humanity that says nothing about the treatment of the deceased – including recording, identifying and returning those killed to their loved ones – would be a sorely lacking instrument for dealing with the worst that humanity sometimes has to offer.
Which makes the participation question the whole question. Every Casualty Counts holds ECOSOC special consultative status and can attend on that basis. The great majority of the organisations actually holding the records of the dead in the conflicts this treaty is being written about cannot. A rule that admits only the accredited produces a convention drafted without the people best placed to say what is missing from it, and the gap towards the dead stays in the text.
Every Casualty Counts is the only global organisation focused exclusively on casualty recording. Read the statement below.
