Liberia

Support for the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

November 2007

The Benetech® Human Rights Program has embarked on a multi-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help clarify Liberia's violent history and hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions.

Established by the 2003 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended fourteen years of civil war in Liberia, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is investigating widespread human rights violations and infringements of humanitarian law during the conflict. Warring factions in Liberia's civil war subjected civilian population to severe human rights abuses including summary execution, sexual violence, forced displacement and property destruction.

As part of its broader mandate to "promote national peace, security, unity and reconciliation," the TRC must determine whether these violations form part of a systematic pattern or policy of abuse. Since the international community has not pushed for the creation of an ad hoc tribunal or other legal mechanism for bringing justice to the citizens of Liberia, the TRC may be Liberia's only mechanism to ensure accountability and end years of impunity.

The TRC has requested Benetech's assistance to develop a data collection and analysis process to address key questions about the nature of the conflict and violations that occurred. The HRP analysis will examine overall patterns and trends of victims and violations over time and space reported to the Commission.

The main analytical study will be based on statistical analysis of victim and witness statements collected by the TRC that correspond to human rights violations from 1979 to 2003. The study will also consider other information about human rights abuses during this period collected from other local and international NGOs.

The resulting analysis will enhance the TRC's ability to address its mandate and contribute to the findings of the Commission. The analysis and findings from the project will be published as part of the TRC's final report. The project is designed to conform to scientific norms as well as internationally accepted statistical and technological best practices.

Since the TRC's inauguration in June 2006, Benetech's Human Rights Program has been advising the Commission on methods for large-scale data collection, quantitative analysis of witness statements and other data about human rights violations. Benetech has also provided guidance to the TRC on statement collection and establishing an information management system to process and prepare statements for eventual analysis.

Benetech's human rights outreach coordinator, Kristen Cibelli, has been working with TRC staff in Liberia to develop a process that converts the qualitative information, contained in thousands of victim and witness testimonies, into data that can be used for quantitative analysis. This process is called "coding," and it involves classifying the narrative information about victims and violations using consistent, repeatable definitions. Benetech's assistance will help ensure that the raw information, carefully collected by the TRC in statements, will be accurately represented and contribute to a defensible analysis.

The Scope of the Project

A significant challenge for all truth commissions is establishing the magnitude, pattern and relative levels of responsibility for "what happened" during a period of mass human rights violations. One of the first questions is always "how many people have been affected?" Scientifically-defensible answers assessing the magnitude of the events, and statistical analysis of patterns of pervasive violence, can help to overcome partisan arguments about blame and victimization. Rigorous statistics that quantify violence can de-politicize arguments, help end impunity and begin the process of justice and reconciliation.

The mandate of the Liberian TRC explicitly requires that it provide an opportunity for victims and perpetrators of past human rights violations to have their voices heard and to present testimony. These statements are the primary source of information for the TRC's investigation into past violence. They offer detailed insight into the nature of violations and experience of each individual.

Together, an aggregate group of statements magnify these voices and provide a body of empirical data that can engage critical questions of policy and accountability. This project will have an immediate, significant impact on the work of the Liberian TRC. By enabling effective capture, preservation and analysis of statements relating to human rights violations, the Commission will be able to tell a broader truth about Liberia's conflict.

The Liberia TRC brings to this project deep local insights into the conflict, access to data sources and policy-relevant hypotheses. The HRP provides the expertise needed to transform information into scientifically-defensible knowledge that can create a clear historical record and end impunity for the perpetrators of human rights abuses.

Members of the HRP have worked for the last fifteen years with nine truth commissions in El Salvador, Haiti, South Africa, Guatemala, Perú, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Timor-Leste and now Liberia. The HRP helps these organizations incorporate information technology and scientific methods that support their mandate to uncover the facts. The HRP assists these groups in their efforts to create analytical objectives, collect data, design and implement an information management system, conduct statistical analysis, integrate quantitative findings and provide follow-up support.

As it has done for past truth commission partners, the HRP will produce a full series of visual representations in the form of graphs and tables. This will allow the TRC to explore the overall quantitative patterns of specific human rights violations and integrate quantitative arguments alongside historical, legal and sociological information.

The HRP will also provide training and ongoing support to help the TRC develop the institutional capacity needed to rigorously manage the processes, methods and tools to defensibly quantify information about human rights violations. This project will transfer software, data processing, quality control methods and other knowledge to Liberia's TRC to build local capacity in data collection and processing methodologies.

Key Questions for This Investigation

The Benetech HRP will assist the Commission to define evidence-based questions that can be answered through the analysis of data about human rights violations collected by or available to the TRC. Examples of analytical questions that could be verified through empirical research include:

• What types of human rights violations did victims reportedly suffer in Liberia? What is the demographic profile of the reported victims (i.e. age, sex, ethnicity, etc)?
• What is the pattern and extent of reported human rights violations over time and geographic location?
• What are the respective levels of responsibility and patterns of behavior among alleged perpetrators?

The results of this analysis could impact potential recommendations of the TRC for prosecution, amnesty, reparation and reconciliation or forgiveness. The findings will also offer a new perspective on the history of Liberia. Providing a contextual description for how and why such a set of violations occurred provides a deeper understanding of the possible causes lying behind the patterns of violations. By helping the Liberian TRC explain history, the statistical picture contributes to reconciliation.

Findings about the behavior and proportional responsibility of alleged perpetrators could impact potential prosecutions recommended by the TRC for former warlords. A body of empirical evidence can help the TRC decide and support their recommendations for prosecutions for perpetrators shown to have responsibility for the most serious crimes. The findings could be of potential evidentiary value in possible future prosecutions.

As it becomes widely known, findings based on the data and statistical analysis may affect voting in future elections. Some individuals who participated in the war may be candidates for political positions. If publicly presented in a sober, nonpartisan report, their war records may reduce their popularity.

The findings and database will also be of value to scholars, lawyers, historians, journalists, human rights and civil society groups and the families of the victims for generations to come.

Methodologies of Human Rights Data Analysis

There is a considerable amount of complexity that must be managed when counting human rights victims and violations:

• Victims can suffer many violations
• The violations can happen at many different times and places
• Each violation may be committed by one or many perpetrators
• Each perpetrator may commit one or many violations

The Benetech HRP has developed the "Who Did What to Whom?" data model to capture and maintain the complex relationships between the different elements, roles and events. A person can be a witness, victim and/or perpetrator within a sequence of events. The data model must be able to accurately reconstruct which victims suffered which violations committed by which perpetrators. Simplifying these points leads to distorted statistical results that can be attacked by opponents of the process.

The most effective way of managing the relationships between different interdependent pieces of information is with a relational database. The HRP has developed Analyzer, a database tool based on the "Who Did What to Whom?" model which is specifically designed to organize human rights data for statistical purposes. Analyzer manages the challenges involved in structuring and quantifying human rights data.

The data must have consistent meaning. Before raw information can be used for data analysis, it has to be in a reasonably regular format or structure. More importantly, this information needs to have a consistent meaning. To convert qualitative information into data that can be used for analysis, the qualitative information must be classified in consistent, repeatable definitions. This process, as described earlier, is called "coding."

For example, what distinguishes "rape" from "sexual abuse?" The two categories must be defined so clearly that the people doing the coding apply the definitions in a standard way. The definition must also be collectively understood so that if the same narrative statement is assigned to all of the coding staff, they would classify it in precisely the same way. We refer to these definitions as the "controlled vocabulary." HRP staff is working with the Commission to develop a controlled vocabulary based on the types of violations that are relevant to Liberia and the TRC's analytical objectives.

The HRP staff is also helping the TRC create a controlled vocabulary for violations and vocabularies needed for other database fields, such as locations and perpetrator institutions.

When more than one person is working on coding, it is important to monitor inter-rater reliability (IRR). IRR measures whether different coders, given the same source material, produce the same quantitative output (e.g. the same number of victims and the same number and type of violations). High levels of IRR, or agreement between the coders, indicate that the information entered into the database is more than the individual interpretations of each of the coders.

Benetech is training the TRC's database manager to administer the database, use a controlled vocabulary to code information about victims and violations, apply software tools to measure IRR, and manage a team of coders to ensure effective, reliable results.

Which statements to code and enter into the database first?

Given the thousands of statements the TRC will collect, which statements should the TRC code and enter into the database first? The TRC will ensure that the data in the database at any point is a random sample of all the data available. They can do this by randomly ordering the statements to be coded using one of several sampling strategies. The sample is also drawn to reflect the proportion of statements collected over time and from different geographic locations. This process is called "input stratification."

By processing and entering the statements according to a random sample, analysis can begin early with a subset of the data, and within a calculable error. This helps ensure that the results of the analysis will be stable as more data is added. Such a strategy allows the TRC to start working with and integrating data from the database long before the final results are available. The HRP is helping the TRC design an input stratification strategy and is training the TRC database manager on a specialized "Stratifier" tool the HRP has designed to assist with this process.

Duplicate reporting

When recording documents about human rights situations, different statements may describe the same event. For example, the same killing may have been reported by multiple different witnesses or sources. When trying to count the total number of abuses in a given conflict, it is critical to distinguish where reports overlap so that violations or victims are not over-counted. The overlaps must be identified by making judgments about which records are unique and which records describe the same participants and events. This process is called "matching" or "record linkage."

Detecting duplicate reporting can be very difficult when investigators have more than a few hundred statements. The HRP has developed a combination of manual and automated matching techniques that draw on data fields that are most relevant for making decisions about whether or not two records refer to the same person. The HRP is working with the Commission to identify and implement the most appropriate process for matching the TRC's data.

An anonymized version of the TRC's data will be available for publication to encourage transparency, further research and analysis. By making both the statistical appendix and the data set publicly available, the TRC can ensure that the analysis can be reproduced or audited by any other person or group who questions the authenticity of the findings. This is important for guaranteeing the credibility and scientifically-defensible nature of the results.

The HRP is also developing a search and reporting module within the TRC database so that Commissioners and research staff can query reference statements pull out specific information for qualitative analysis, case studies, anecdotal evidence, and quotes.

Because the Benetech Human Rights Program's software is free and open source, all the engineering developments made to enhance the database and analysis tools for the TRC in Liberia will benefit subsequent projects for other truth commissions around the world.

Originally based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), HRDAG has provided technical assistance in the following countries:

Africa

• Chad
• Ghana
• Liberia
• Sierra Leone
• South Africa

Asia

• Afghanistan
• Bangladesh
• Cambodia
• India
• Timor-Leste
• Sri Lanka

Europe

• Kosovo

Middle East

• Iran

Central America and Caribbean

• El Salvador
• Guatemala
• Haiti
• México

South America

• Colombia
• Perú

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The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) applies information technology solutions and statistical techniques to help human rights advocates build evidence-based arguments.