Working in Conflict and Politically Sensitive Contexts

Before any forensic team deploys to a conflict or post-conflict environment, a security assessment is conducted that covers the political environment (who controls the area, what their interests are in the investigation), the physical terrain (access routes, proximity to active military or criminal activity), and the specific threat level (documented incidents against similar teams or sources in the area). This assessment informs the decision to deploy, the team composition, the communication plan, and the evacuation procedure.

During field operations, communication discipline is maintained: check-in schedules with a base or liaison, pre-agreed code words indicating duress, and limits on what is communicated over channels that may be monitored. The location of active excavation sites may be held as sensitive information until the excavation is complete and documented, to prevent interference. GPS coordinates in field notes may use an offset datum known only to the team leader until the site is secured.

• Pre-deployment security briefing covering the specific threat environment, chain of command, and evacuation routes.
• Regular check-in schedule with a support coordinator outside the field area.
• Communication security: limiting sensitive information to encrypted channels or face-to-face briefings.
• Site location security: restricting publication of GPS coordinates until excavation and documentation are complete.
• Liaison with UN or international forces where present and credible.
• Incident reporting: all threats, surveillance, and interference documented as part of the case file.

Standard chain-of-custody practice assumes access to secure storage, reliable transport, and trustworthy institutional partners. In hostile field environments, these assumptions often do not hold. A local police force may be implicated in the events being investigated. Storage facilities may not be secure. Transport may require crossing checkpoints controlled by parties with adverse interests. The chain-of-custody protocol must be robust to these conditions.

Redundancy is the primary adaptation. Every exhibit is photographed before, during, and after packaging. Unique identifiers are applied that are not easily reproducible (custom seals, coded labels). Parallel documentation copies are maintained at separate locations so that loss or interference with one set does not break the chain. Where possible, critical evidence is transferred directly to an international body's custody rather than a national authority whose impartiality is uncertain.

In many mass grave investigations, the initial intelligence about a site's location comes from a witness: a survivor, a participant forced to assist, a local resident who observed activity, or a former official with knowledge of disposal operations. These sources take personal risk in providing information. Perpetrators or their associates, if still present in the area, have an interest in suppressing information and silencing witnesses.

Source protection in this context is an operational obligation, not merely an ethical aspiration. Practically, it means that the identity of individuals who provided information about a site's location is not included in any document that could be accessed by parties adverse to the investigation. Site reports describe how the site was identified in terms of the information type (community information, remote sensing analysis, declassified archive material) without identifying the individual source. Where a witness will be called to testify, their identity is managed by the prosecutorial authority and the court's witness protection unit, not by the forensic team.

The forensic team's responsibility is to document any threats or intimidation directed at sources or team members as part of the official record. Such incidents are themselves evidence of obstructing justice and can be included in the prosecution's case. Keeping this record complete and current is both a professional obligation and a practical protection: documented intimidation is harder to dismiss than verbal reports.

Evidence in a mass grave investigation can become politically charged when findings contradict a state narrative, implicate named officials, or support a particular community's historical claims against another. The pressure this creates can be direct (requests to alter conclusions, refusals to release exhibits, access denials to specific sites) or indirect (public attacks on the team's credibility, funding withdrawal, harassment of local counterparts).

The professional standard is unambiguous: forensic findings are reported as the evidence supports them, regardless of their political implications. The mechanisms that protect this standard in practice are institutional independence (operating under agreements that insulate the team's conclusions from state control), transparent methodology (all raw data available for independent review), and the explicit separation of factual findings from interpretive opinion in reports. A finding that a specific mass grave exists and contains identified individuals is a factual result. The legal attribution of responsibility for those deaths is a matter for courts, not for the forensic report.

Guatemala's FAFG has been operating since 1992, working primarily on sites related to the internal armed conflict (1960-1996) in which approximately 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, the majority of them Indigenous Maya. The programme operated for many years in an environment where military officers responsible for the killings held government positions, and where community members who provided information faced credible threats. FAFG's key adaptations were systematic community consultation before each excavation, a community liaison role for every field team, and a protocol for documenting and escalating threats.

In Cambodia, DC-Cam maintained the archive of Khmer Rouge documents that formed the foundation of evidence for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, established in 2003. The forensic challenge at Khmer Rouge sites was different from Srebrenica or Guatemala: many sites had been disturbed by decades of post-conflict activity, and the political context included former Khmer Rouge cadres who had been integrated into the post-conflict government under the 1998 peace agreement. DC-Cam's documentary and forensic work had to navigate a legal process where the defendants lived openly in Cambodia until their arrest, and where national political sentiment about the proceedings was divided.

In Kosovo, EULEX's forensic component assisted the Kosovo authorities with missing-persons investigations beginning in 2008, a decade after the 1998-99 conflict. By this point the sites were cold, many remains had been moved or disturbed in the intervening years, and the political environment involved a contested state whose independence was not recognised by all UN member states. The challenge was building sufficient trust between the EULEX team, Kosovo institutions, and Serbian authorities (who had rights of participation in investigations relating to their missing) to allow evidence to be shared across a politically contested border.

The UN OHCHR field manual provides operational guidance for human rights monitoring and investigation in complex environments. For forensic practitioners, its most relevant sections cover evidence documentation (the requirement that findings be recorded in a form that can be independently verified), source protection (the prohibition on including identifying source information in documents that could be accessed by adverse parties), and the coordination protocol for multi-agency investigations (defining which body has primacy over evidence decisions and how disputes are resolved).

The manual is not a technical forensic guide; it is a governance and procedure document. Its value is in providing a reference point for what an investigation should have done, used retrospectively to evaluate whether the investigation met the standard required for its findings to be relied upon. Courts and human rights treaty bodies apply this reference when a state challenges the adequacy of a human rights investigation. Forensic teams that align their procedures with the manual from the outset are better placed to withstand such challenges.