UN investigative team in Iraq 'digitising' Daesh war crimes evidence to support prosecutions

The UN investigative team to promote accountability for crimes committed by the Daesh terror group is ”digitising” war crimes evidence to support prosecutions of perpetrators, an official said Wednesday, Anadolu Agency reports.

Christian Ritscher, the head of UNITAD, said his team is assisting the Iraqi judiciary to organise and access “considerable volumes of Daesh records and battlefield evidence, via a mega digitisation project.”

”Digitisation operations have been launched at five courts in Iraq, and two further courts will follow in the coming months,” he told the UN Security Council. ”As of now, the impressive amount of 8 million pages of Daesh documents from the holdings of the Iraqi authorities, including Kurdish authorities has been digitised.”

He said his team will establish a central archive that would be the unified repository of all digitised evidence against Daesh in the coming days.

”The central repository will play a key role to support prosecutions of Daesh perpetrators for the international crimes in Iraq,” he said. ”It could be a milestone to found a comprehensive e-justice system in Iraq which can be upheld as a leading example not only in the region, but also globally.”

Ritscher said his team also works closely with competent investigative judges in Europe, who fully support their investigations.

Daesh seized vast swathes of territory in Iraq and in Syria and declared a self-styled caliphate in 2014.

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