everycasualty News&Comment
The items posted here illustrate why transparent, humanising casualty recording is crucial. Although news reports of casualties are a staple of journalism, less frequently explored are the complexities of the recording process, the immediate and long-term benefits of doing it properly and the many harms involved in failing to do so. This collection examines those issues.
Leading by example: The UN Human Rights Council's report on casualties in Libya
Although out of the spotlight, the intervention in Libya remains a point of contention internationally. The publication this month of the UN Human Rights Council's International Commission of Inquiry's second report provides both new information on civilian casualties and a formal call upon NATO to do its share to record them. more...
NATO Watch Press Brief
Towards Drone Attack Accountability
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is one of the handful of organisations globally that thoroughly investigate drone casualties in Pakistan. more...
LRA Crisis Tracker Annual Security Brief, 2011
LRA Crisis Tracker (LCT) has released its Annual Security Brief for 2011, covering the actions and outcomes of the Lords Resistance Army. more...
100 Additional NGOs and Associations Sign up to the Charter
The Network for Peace Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and their campaign Choosing Peace Together has signed on 100 Additional NGOs to the Charter for the Recognition of Every Casualty in Armed Violence. more...
Action On Armed Violence Syria Report
IPN member AOAV provides a collation and analysis of the ongoing armed conflict in Syria. The focus of their work is on the effects of explosive weapons, providing a breakdown of the type of weapons and the casualties they have caused. more...
The Truth Teller: Natasa Kandic, Urging Serbs To Face The Past
Radio Free Europe discusses Natasa Kandic, Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade, battle for searching for the truth and seeking justice for past atrocities. more...
In strikes on Libya by NATO, an unspoken civilian toll
This New York Times article extends this newspaper's concern for the unaccounted casualties of the Libya intervention more...
Tamil Information Centre Press Release
The Tamil Information Centre calls on the Sri Lanka government to create a single authoritative record of casualties of Armed Violence.
The Tamil Information Centre (TIC), an IPN member, responds to the recent statement made by the Sri Lankan government outlining its objective to thoroughly record casualties resulting from the war. TIC elaborates the need for full information on casualties and emphasises that every person killed by armed violence is promptly recorded, correctly identified and publicly acknowledged. more...
Libya counts its martyrs, but the bodies don't add up
This New York Times article, comparing claims by the NTC about the number of casualties of the war in Libya with the current verifiable death toll, draws attention to the tendency of political leaders in conflict to issue round-number casualty totals, which are uncorroborated by any verifiable data. more...
Libya: the toll NATO didn't count
Hamit Dardagan of Iraq Body Count and the everycasualty programme highlights Nato's failure even to attempt a comprehensive accounting of civilian casualties in Libya despite their protection being the stated purpose of the Alliance's intervention. more...
The people on the street document casualties – why can't governments?
John Sloboda of Oxford Research Group's everycasualty programme looks at the citizen led efforts to record and memorialise the dead of the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world, and argues that all war victims deserve that same treatment. more...
Methods research: early impressions
This 15 minute slideshow discusses some preliminary impressions from Oxford Research Group's research to analyse how different organisations worldwide are recording violent deaths from conflict. more...
Video of the launch of the Charter
On the 15 September 2011 the Charter for the recognition of every casualty of armed violence was launched at the British Academy in London. The public launch included speeches from Wissam Tarif of Insan, who work in Syria, and Sandra Orlović of the Humanitarian Law Centre-Serbia and Bekim Blakaj of the Humanitarian Law Centre-Kosovo, who discussed how the Charter's core demands are both important to their work and necessary as standards for the world community. more...
Presentation: why we should document every casualty of conflict, both civilian and combatant
On 9 May 2011, Elizabeth Minor of Oxford Research Group's everycasualty programme made this presentation to Café Diplo, the meeting series of the friends of Le Monde Diplomatique Newspaper in London. Setting the arguments in the context of current and former conflicts, from Libya to Afghanistan, Iraq to Bosnia, Elizabeth demonstrates the social, political and human importance of recording every casualty of conflict as an individual. more...
Drones and the legal obligation to record casualties: presentation by Professor Susan Breau
On Thursday 23 June at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), Oxford Research Group's everycasualty programme launched our major finding that there is a legal obligation to record every casualty of conflict, and that this obligation applies to the drone strikes being conducted in Pakistan and Yemen by the CIA. This is the presentation of Professor Susan Breau, Legal Consultant to everycasualty and Professor of International Law at Flinders University. more...
Truth seeking, truth telling and truth keeping in bosnia: interview with Mirsad Tokača
In this interview Mirsad Tokača, Director of the Research and Documentation Center of Sarajevo (RDC), discusses the work of his organisation to document human losses in Bosnia, and the Center's aim of contributing to processes of Transitional Justice in a society with a deeply contested recent past by providing solid records, and hence truth. more...
Understanding violence in Colombia: interview with Jorge Restrepo
In this interview Jorge Restrepo, Director of the Conflict Analysis Resource Center (CERAC) in Bogotá, Colombia, discusses the work of his organisation to document the violence of the Colombian civil conflict. more...
The escalating casualties in Pakistan, 2005 - 2010
The Costs of War project is part of Brown University. The project takes an interdisciplinary look at the effects of war. In the article and publication linked here, Costs of War integrates and assesses the human costs of conflict in Pakistan. more...
Afghan civilians killed or wounded by British forces: the investigations listed
This article by the Guardian illustrates the existence of systematic and comprehensive recording by the UK government of a specific category of casualty over an extended period of time, and the (partial) publication of detailed data from that recording activity at the level of individual incident. more...
After Libya, let us learn to count every casualty of war
The Guardian's Jonathan Steele, who was present at the launch of the Charter for the recognition of every casualty of armed violence at the British Academy on 14 September in London, welcomes the charter and discusses its pertinence to Libya and beyond in the first major op-ed focusing on the charter and the NGOs who back it. more...
Drone warfare: cost and challenge
The repositioning of the United States' military strategy includes a great expansion in the use of armed drones to attack targets in Pakistan and Yemen. This development raises profound legal and ethical questions including the need to record the casualties of such attacks, argues Paul Rogers in this piece originally published on OpenDemocracy. more...
The casualties of war: Libya and beyond
The architects of a decade of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya devote great efforts to assessing the military aspects of their operations – yet are silent on the human damage. Paul Rogers discusses this damage and the Costs of War project of everycasualty programme advisor, Neta Crawford. more...
New initiative on recording casualties of armed violence
everycasualty's press release for the launch of the Charter for the recognition of every casualty of armed violence. more...