TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 1

Subsection 4

The work behind the scenes

38 The people who testified in public made up less than one-tenth of all the people who made statements. It is important to stress that all the statements received the same degree of attention by the Human Rights Violations Committee. In order to provide this attention, it became necessary to curtail the public hearings and focus on the mass of statements and on making findings in every case.

The processing of the information

39 Once a statement had been registered on the database, the deponent was sent a letter of acknowledgement, thanking them for having made it, and giving the reference number to be used in the case of any enquiries.

40 Thereafter, each stage of the process (the corroboration, and later the finding) was captured on the database.⁹

Corroboration

41 Each of the statements had to be investigated so that the Commission could be assured of its veracity. This task was carried out by the Investigation Unit and is fully described in its report.¹⁰

42 The Human Rights Violations Committee relied extensively on the team of investigators to obtain corroborative evidence to substantiate the statements it received. A great deal of this work consisted of seeking documentary evidence – court records, inquest records, police occurrence books, prison registers, hospital or other medical records. All too often, this was not available: either the normal passage of time or deliberate concealment had led to its being destroyed. When such material could not be found, either the deponents themselves or witnesses had to be tracked down and statements obtained from them.

43 Other difficulties stemmed from decisions to amend the statement form or ‘protocol’, which went through several changes, influenced both by evaluations of the early batches of statements and by the need to obtain information in a format which allowed for its standardisation and capture. At an early stage, it was decided to remove the demand for the statement to be made on oath, since there was a potential for error in the process of its being written down by the statement taker. At a later stage, it was decided to remove the portion providing for a general narrative and to focus instead on capturing multiple violations and many perpetrators. This may have made it easier to systematise the information, but it resulted in the loss of a potentially rich source of broader information which could have enhanced the corroboration process.

44 In a limited number of cases, no corroboration could be obtained, not even a statement from an eyewitness. For most of these, the Committee was reluctantly obliged to declare that it was ‘unable to make a finding’ and notify the deponent accordingly. Such deponents still had the right to revert to the Commission with any further arguments or documentation they could put forward. In other cases, details of date, place, event and perpetrators were sufficiently accurate and consonant with known incidents to allow a finding to be made on ‘a balance of probabilities’.

45 In the final, overall national ratification of the findings made (see below), commissioners relied on the principle of inclusivity and concern for the victims, and endeavoured to reach positive findings whenever the circumstances allowed this, even where available information was extremely scanty.

Decisions on policy

46 Before findings could be made, clarity was required on definitions and criteria.

47 The founding legislation spelt out the fairly circumscribed nature of human rights violations on which the Commission was to focus: “the violation of human rights through the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill-treatment of any person” emanating from the conflicts of the past and carried out or planned by any person acting with a political motive.¹¹ There were many challenges from outside the Commission about what this should include, and many debates within the Commission and the Human Rights Violations Committee.

Definition of ‘gross violation of human rights’

48 This definition limited the attention of the Commission to events which emanated from the conflicts of the past, rather than from the policies of apartheid. There had been an expectation that the Commission would investigate many of the human rights violations which were caused, for example, by the denial of freedom of movement through the pass laws, by forced removals of people from their land, by the denial of the franchise to citizens, by the treatment of farm workers and other labour disputes, and by discrimination in such areas as education and work opportunities. Many organisations lobbied the Commission to insist that these issues should form part of its investigations. Commission members, too, felt that these were important areas that could not be ignored. Nevertheless, they could not be interpreted as falling directly within the Commission’s mandate.

49 The Commission recognised that these issues formed part of the broader context within which the specifically defined gross human rights violations had taken place. It sought to give attention to them by receiving submissions from a number of organisations that had been particularly concerned with these issues in the past.¹² These submissions made a valuable contribution to the section of the final report dealing with the broad context within which the gross violations of human rights took place, although they could not be considered as victim hearings. They gave depth to the larger picture, but they still excluded individuals from recognition and from access to reparations, and many people remained aggrieved.