TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 6

Part Appendix

Subsection 1

■ APPENDIX 1: METHODOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Terms of reference

1 In February 1996, the Commission’s Database Development Group⁶ reviewed the Act to determine sources of information legally available to the Commission, and the kinds of reports and analysis that would be necessary to satisfy the functions defined by the Act as objectives of the Commission.

2 The group developed the specifications for an information management system aimed at providing a rigorous and consistent process through which raw information given to or collected by the Commission would meet the analytical and reporting objectives set out in the Act - particularly in section 4, ‘Functions of the Commission’.

3 Requirements that the system had to satisfy were:

a In accordance with section 4(b), the Commission would receive human rights violations statements from tens of thousands of individual deponents and from thousands of amnesty applicants.

b Such a large volume of data required methodical and consistent treatment to ensure that each statement and amnesty application received a fair and equal evaluation of its content and balance of probabilities.⁷

c The information stored by the Commission had to be accessible to each of the four regional offices because each statement or amnesty application might have implications for hearings or investigations in any of the other offices.

4 The Commission adopted an eight-stage information flow to collect information, process it into standard internal formats, capture it in a computerised database and then analyse it using quantitative and qualitative techniques. This analysis fulfilled three requirements of the Act, in terms of which the Commission was obliged to:

a identify those violations that constituted a “systematic pattern of abuse” (section 4(a)(i)). To achieve this, the Commission used quantitative analyses to show statistical regularity.

b describe the “nature ... and extent” of gross human rights violations (4(a)(ii)).⁸ The ‘nature’ of violations means the types of violations that were committed and in what ways; the ‘extent’ of violations was interpreted to mean how many violations were committed.

c produce a report on its “activities and findings” (Section 4(e)). Given the importance and magnitude of the Commission’s ‘activities’, it was considered necessary to include a statistical description of the population who gave statements to the Commission or applied for amnesty.

The structural complexity of human rights violations

Every effort was made to avoid errors in representation and analysis of the information collected by the Commission. A deponent who gives a statement presents a narrative account of great potential complexity.⁹ To avoid errors of representation and analysis, the Commission’s database was designed to address the following complexities:

a Many victims: the deponent may speak about violations that happened to one or many victims. The deponent may or may not herself be a victim. She may discuss her own detention and subsequent torture in addition to her son’s killing or her husband’s disappearance.

b Many violations: each of the victims described in a particular statement may have suffered one or several gross violations. For example, the deponent’s son may have been detained and tortured on several separate occasions before he was killed. These violations may have been connected to other violations that occurred at the same time and place (for example, several different people detained and tortured together), or they may have been isolated incidents.

c Many perpetrators: each of the violations described in the statement may have been committed by one or many perpetrators. Furthermore, each of the identified perpetrators in the narrative may have been responsible for one or more violations. For example, a deponent might identify Mr A as the man responsible both for her torture and for her daughter’s killing.

6 The Commission took great care to build a system that was sufficiently flexible to accept any combination of these complexities, without simplifying deponents’ stories in ways that led to the distortion or systematic concealment of certain kinds of information. Accepting a reduced version of a complex story is a frequent cause of this kind of distortion.

7 The data was very carefully managed at every stage of the information management process, in order to maximise validity, reliability and precision of analysis from the information given to the Commission. This was done for the following reasons:

a The Act required that findings be “based on factual and objective information” (section 4(e)). For the information to be factual, it had to be collected and stored without introducing oversimplifying distortions. For the information to be objective, it had to be coded in standard forms and according to clear and consistent definitions.

b Respect for deponents and victims¹⁰ involved treating statements with integrity, and keeping them intact to the limits of the available technology. Integrity, in this sense, meant that deponents’ narratives should not be fragmented; nor portions discarded through decisions of the Commission¹¹ or inadequate representation. There was a need for information to be maintained in a secure fashion and protected from theft or abuse, and the analysis needed accurately to reflect the information given in statements and qualified by findings.