Melanie Klinkner
It does not require much reflection to conclude that, overall, 2025 has not been a good year from a human rights perspective. Regardless of whether international law is in ‘crisis’, dead or still alive, mass atrocities keep being perpetrated at an alarming rate. Claims of mass graves in Sudan’s city of el-Fasher emerged recently and our ‘mass grave alert’ function resulted in 15 new entries from across the globe over the last 30 days alone. Over recent months, Syrian authorities have uncovered several mass graves across different regions of the country, containing the remains of hundreds of individuals who were killed during the years prior to the collapse of the Assad regime. In April 2025 the International Court of Justice heard claims that Gaza was being turned into a mass grave.
Sadly, while mass graves continue to be found globally, proper forensic recovery, legal safeguarding or communication to families of the missing is often lacking. Befitting of the International Human Rights day, five years ago to the day, we published the Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection and Investigation in an attempt to highlight international standards that would help foster protection and investigations of sites to advance truth and justice efforts for survivors. The document offers a cohesive and universal set of rules, procedures and standards that relate to the full life cycle of the mass grave, for actors engaged by the process(es). Building on international law and the Minnesota Protocol, it indicates the many complexities, interactions, context-specificities and resources necessary to undertake an effective mass grave investigation.
Since 2021 the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has utilised the Bournemouth Protocol for capacity building and in-country training to facilitate and safeguard legally compliant, indiscriminate, dignified, scientifically sound, and societally appropriate handling of mass graves (in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Albania, Azerbaijan, Canada and Ukraine). The Protocol has been translated into 14 languages, based on current investigation needs, identified in conjunction with expert practitioners thereby helping to instigate and cement rights-informed engagement with mass graves.
Much has happened in the past five years. According to the ACLED Conflict Index global conflicts nearly doubled suggesting over 230,000 deaths caused by conflict. Since 2023 the MaGPIE project has been mapping mass graves across the world to provide an evidence-based substrate showing the scale of mass graves, the victims they contain and their investigative status (to the extent this is known). In addition, we are starting to look at a review of the Bournemouth Protocol. With near instantaneous social media feeds, news reporting and general open-source documentation of these conflicts come new challenges for the way human remains, mass graves, secondary victims and actors are protected.
Our emerging agenda for further review of the Bournemouth Protocol is therefore designed to learn from new contexts and examine new questions. This is likely to include the digital realm, not only reflecting on the role human rights technology generally may play in advancing protection and investigation but also the adverse impact this may have.
For example, while digital documentation is an important element of the investigative process, capturing and distributing information and images of violence may include misconduct against the dead whereby dignity is compromised. Where such imagery enters the public domain, it will have effect on the relatives of the dead who may suffer harm from the publication of unauthorised images. Core questions thus may be ‘how do weave digital and psychosocial into practice?’ But also, ‘how could technology and appropriate digital platforms, aid accessibility and effectiveness of the protection and investigation of mass graves?’
Undeterred by the emergence and perpetration of mass atrocity events, we are keen to continue the collaborative efforts with our expert communities to, wherever possible, create improved, workable and robust policy updates. And, consoled by the thought that today’s documentation may serve tomorrow’s justice efforts, the team continue to collate information on mass graves from across the globe.
