Documentation and Denial: The Fight Over Evidence of Mass Atrocities
Kate Cronin-Furman
Associate Professor in Human Rights
University College London
In 2017, as three quarters of a million Burmese Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, Burmese government officials insisted that the Rohingya were torching their own villages and fleeing to damage Burma’s international reputation. In 2009, with extensive photographic and video evidence circulating of mass civilian death caused by government shelling, Sri Lankan officials loudly touted their military campaign’s “zero civilian casualty” count, claiming any allegations to the contrary were terrorist propaganda.
State perpetrated mass atrocities are a devastatingly common feature of the international system, and in many cases, they are accompanied by a pattern of almost farcically implausible denials. Distinct from the protestations of the newly accused hoping to escape blame, these are denials that lack any facial credibility and persist long after the emergence of confirmatory evidence of guilt. But even though these denials do little to convince anybody of perpetrators’ innocence, they can form a core component of a strategy aimed at preventing international interference.
This project explores how state perpetrators of mass atrocities use denials alongside information access restriction to create a heightened burden of proof on the world stage for victims and their allies. Through a close examination of the tension between victims’ efforts to expose abuses and powerful perpetrators’ attempts to conceal them across cases including Tigray, Sri Lanka, and Burma, it illuminates the role that strategic contestation over information plays in facilitating the commission of atrocities and disrupting international will to intervene.
Kate Cronin-Furman is associate professor of political science and director of the Human Rights Masters of Arts program at University College London. Her research focuses on human rights and on the prevention and punishment of mass atrocities. She is author of Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities (Cornell University Press, 2022) and is one of the conveners of the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium, which provides methodological and ethics training and support to researchers working in violence-affected contexts. She holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University, as well as a Juris Doctor, having previously practiced law in New York, Cambodia, and The Hague.