Pink Form
Definition
The INTERPOL DVI post-mortem recording form, used to document all biometric data collected from human remains (fingerprints, dental charts, DNA, physical descriptors, medical history).
- Issuing body
- INTERPOL
- Purpose
- Post-mortem DVI data recording
- Data captured
- Fingerprints, dental charts, DNA, descriptors, medical history
- Context
- Disaster victim identification
Common questions
Why is the Pink Form standardised internationally rather than left to each country's own format?+
Mass fatality events often involve victims and responding teams from multiple countries, so a shared standardised form lets forensic teams from different jurisdictions record post-mortem data in a consistent format that can be directly compared and reconciled against ante-mortem records regardless of who collected it.
What is the Pink Form compared against to reach an identification?+
It is matched against the corresponding ante-mortem Yellow Form, which records the same categories of information gathered from family interviews and existing records for a missing person, and reconciliation between the two forms is how a formal identification is confirmed.
Related terms
- Bonaparte
- NFI kinship-matching software used in the MH17 DVI operation and subsequent Dutch-led mass-casualty responses; handles pedigrees across multiple national reference-sample databases.
- Direct Reference Match
- A DVI DNA comparison between a post-mortem profile and a reference profile derived from a personal effect (toothbrush, razor, stored sample) known...
- DVI (Disaster Victim Identification)
- The systematic multi-agency process for identifying victims of mass-casualty events, governed by the INTERPOL DVI Guide 2018 revision. Organises work into five...
- Kinship Match
- A DVI DNA comparison between a post-mortem profile and reference profiles from one or more biological relatives, using a pedigree-based likelihood ratio...
- M-FIsys
- Kinship-matching software developed by the Netherlands Forensic Institute and first deployed at scale in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami Thailand DVI operation.
- NYC OCME
- New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner; led the 9/11 WTC DNA identification operation and developed the mini-STR and high-throughput mtDNA...
- Yellow Form
- The INTERPOL DVI ante-mortem recording form, completed by family liaison officers using information and reference samples provided by relatives of the missing.