Starting 31 May, over 40 Afghan and non-Afghan practitioners and experts gathered at RWI in Lund and online for a 3-day roundtable about documentation of human rights violations in Afghanistan. The event was the second RWI roundtable in 2023, organised in the framework of the Institute’s Afghanistan programme, which supports and counts on support from the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan. The SR is hosted by RWI as visiting professor.
The RWI programme, including this roundtable, is funded by Swedish Development Cooperation.
The aim of the second roundtable was for participants to share information about their respective documentation and preservation initiatives, and to recognise and address both challenges and opportunities by identifying opportunities for coordination and collaboration with a view to strengthening impact, and by sharing standards and modalities among UN, ICC and civil society documentation procedures, with a view to facilitating cooperation and improved impact.
The majority of participants actively engage in documentation initiatives regarding past and present human rights violations in Afghanistan, while others participated to share experiences, promising methods and practices from other contexts, or to share as experts in international documentation standards from different UN bodies, including the UNSR and ICC, and for universal jurisdiction.
The roundtable saw active discussions both broadly and around specific aims for documentation.
A range of subjects were discussed including documentation and reporting methodologies, investigation, preservation, prosecution, protection, truth telling, advocacy and gender persecution.
A set of action points were agreed on the last day which, subject to funding, will be pursued by RWI and collaboratively between relevant actors. The action points included training on international standards and methodologies, as well as continued forums for dialogue and cooperation. Online group forums have been established on the RWI platform supporting the roundtable to facilitate continued discussions until action point activities can commence in larger scale.
A roundtable on the same topic will follow this summer for stakeholders based in North America.