On 7 November 2025, our Association expert, Prof. Borys Babin, took part in the Ukraine Accountability Collaboration Platform meeting “Prospects for War Crimes Documentation Efforts and the Future of War Archives”, held in Kyiv in hybrid format by the Human Rights and Justice Program of the “International Renaissance Foundation”.
Key officials of the State Archival Service of Ukraine (SASU) and Ukrainian and foreign experts exchanged their opinions and experiences regarding the national and international documentation initiatives, preservation of collected data, and possible methods of cooperation between documentation initiatives and the SASU.
Also, the launch of the Interagency Working Group to coordinate the activities on preserving documentary evidence of the events of the Russian Federation’s armed aggression and the creation of the Archive of the War for Independence were discussed.
Prof. Babin described to participants our Association’s experience collaborating with UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Prof. Bernard Duhaime, for his Report A/HRC/60/32, “Documentation of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law” preparation, including relevant submissions on challenges of documenting the international crimes committed in the Russia-occupied Crimea.
The ARC expert stressed the importance of the demands of the Report A/HRC/60/32, adopted this July, to the civil society organizations involved in documentation to establish clear and rigorous internal guidelines and procedures for the investigation, documentation, collection, preservation, safeguarding, and archiving of evidence, information, and testimonies related to serious human rights violations, as well as for the interviewing of victims and witnesses, and to ensure the adequate training of personnel in charge of these functions.
Prof. Babin added that the provisions of the Report A/HRC/60/32 are extremely important for the SASU and other state actors’ activities, so for human rights and humanitarian NGOs, it is being implemented systematically now in the project convened by the “The Tenth of April” organization, exactly “Voices of Vitnesses – Stories for Justice” in the southern regions of Ukraine, for documenting victims of Russian war crimes.
