ABOVE: Uncovering a mass grave near Srebrenica. Unarmed Bosnian Muslim males were rounded up and murdered and bulldozed into mass graves.
11 July 2011 — Over the last few years my Project Counsel team has been involved in many aspects of war crimes trials and human rights abuse cases, from the e-discovery/staffing side (providing attorneys for special projects, managing the accumulation/organization of evidence, etc.) as well as coverage of the trials themselves through our media division Luminative Media. But we have not seen such a cascade of events such as we have seen in the last two months.
Today marks the 15th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica. The biggest event in the last few months was the capture at the end May of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic who engineered that massacre after 16 years on the run. Extradition was quick: he was handed to the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague on May 31st to stand trial. His arrest is good news for the relatives of those killed at Srebrenica and for international justice, which may be slow but doesn’t forget.
Equally important were two court cases:
– a Dutch court has held the Netherlands responsible for the deaths of three Muslim men executed by Bosnian Serb troops in the massacres at Srebrenica. The unexpected ruling could open the field for new suits against the Netherlands by relatives of other Srebrenica victims.
– A U.S. federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit by Indonesian villagers that seeks to hold Exxon Mobil liable for alleged killings and torture committed by Indonesian soldiers guarding a natural-gas plant in the country’s Aceh province. Among its holdings, the appeals court ruled that corporations can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 federal law that allows U.S. suits for violations of international law.
Shortly after the capture of Ratko Mladic I wrote a short piece on the political/legal issues surrounding “the G-word”: genocide. But there is a fascinating e-discovery element to these war crimes proceedings, and how the United Nations faces the need to manage the accumulation, organization, and access to evidence relating to war crimes. The UN team that is responsible for gathering and handling the information to be used in such trials faces the challenge of making millions of documents in many formats and many languages available to prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and other court stakeholders. This war crimes evidence originates in multiple formats from disparate sources, for example — TV program tapes, radio broadcasts, news and military photographs, home movies, home photos, recorded telephone communications, and other rich media formats in addition to masses of paper documents and the standard electronic text of emails and other natively electronic documents.
For those of us involved in the commercial sector of e-discovery it can be a most banal experience, having an irredeemable dullness. But the United Nations war crime tribunals work embody every extreme and special circumstance when it comes to eDiscovery challenges and requirements. It is thrilling — and gruesome — stuff, with every trial having its own complexities involving data formats, scalability, language support, rules of procedure, and confidentiality.
The tribunals face the daunting task of ensuring full and equitable access to all of this diverse evidentiary information by all parties to the trial. Such access requires that all parties with legitimate “right to know” have to receive complete, accurate, and timely production of requested documents or for topics within documents. The process typically involves multiple professions, such as digital forensics specialists, lawyers, and IT professionals, all with slightly different objectives and requirements, which must ultimately ensure system operations protocols that can be certified by the governing authority, in this case, by the UN tribunal itself.
The e-discovery vendor they chose? ZyLAB. And the reasons are simple. Quoting from a detailed report issued last week by International Data Corporation (IDC) titled “ZyLAB: Enabling Prosecution of the Unspeakable” (not publicly available):
“ZyLAB’s software also offered a broad range of features and functionality critical to the eDiscovery process. Document capture and sophisticated OCR, for example, had been a foundation capability in developing the company’s business. The ability to recognize documents from different languages and to differentiate and process languages notated in multiple character sets was a system necessity (e.g., evidence in the Milošević trial incorporated over 13 languages, including some written in Cyrillic character sets). The multilanguage query parsing capability supported system users working in one native language to achieve the same results as users working in a different native language. Sophisticated indexing technology was required for the project, which enabled the UN team to use the ZyLAB system to classify documents; exhaustively identify people, features, and entities referenced in documents; and create a text and metadata repository that normalized millions of evidence items while supporting legal review operations that could be executed within the time frames stipulated in the UN tribunal’s procedural guidelines. The software also offered a portal-like interface that provided an intelligent discovery workspace for the set of varied professionals at work on the trial”.
The Office of the Prosecutor had already established a relationship with ZyLAB which has it’s major office located nearby and had done a number of smaller projects with the prosecutor’s office previously, and was willing to commit highly skilled professionals to onsite support. Such support is particularly important because of the complexity of the problems the UN team was facing and because of the foreshortened time frames within which the team needed to make the evidentiary information available to the prosecution and defense teams.
The report addresses key topics for CIO’s and CTO’s to consider in preparation for e-discovery, including connector architecture, disparate system data, recall and search, text analytics, taxonomy, multi-language operations, multimedia operations, etc. (The link to the report above takes you to the ZyLAB site where you can get a copy for free; the IDC site will charge $500).
NOTE: ZyLAB software also has a significant presence in Brussels in DG COMP, the European Commission division that monitors and enforces compliance with antitrust and competition laws.