Put the ICTY Archives Online!

As this essay in the invaluable Institute for War and Peace Studies argues, a debate over the final location of the ICTY’s documentary archives is missing the point.

The archive of the ICTY is a vast and invaluable collection, and its holdings will be indispensible for anyone researching or investigating events of the 1990s, in any former Yugoslav republic.



But most importantly, it is a digitised archive. Over the past 15 years, ICTY employees have scanned virtually every document and made many of them searchable, so that anyone with appropriate access to the tribunal’s computers can find references to a person, place, word, or topic among the millions of documents gathered by tribunal investigators.

For purely historical purposes, this stuff should be available. Because I suppose legal liability will continue to be an issue even after the ICTY closes shop, there needs to be some filtering. Still, it is tempting just to put it all online. It’s already digitized. And it would unleash the bloggers of the world (who speak the relevant languages) on the process of building a more complete historical record of the Balkan wars and their aftermath.