https://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/kaleidoscope/april2010/April2010.htm
or
https://cornell.app.box.com/s/gdcqgmqvyhtf3t0bl6ydduogmb5uv4aj/1/11562487244/96996086298/1
(scroll down the linked page above and you will find what you see below)
See archive at http://ictr-archive09.library.cornell.edu/
Preserving the Legacy of the ICTR
Claire Germain
Three of us from Cornell University Library found ourselves in Arusha, Tanzania for a week in June 2009 as United Nations consultants at the invitation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Together with my colleagues Thomas Mills, research attorney and head of collections at Law, and Stuart Basefsky, information specialist at Catherwood and director of the IWS News Bureau of the Institute for Workplace Studies, I had been invited to provide advice and assistance in helping to preserve the heritage of the Tribunal which was scheduled to close in 2010. We had also been asked to find ways to help raise the profile of the Tribunal in order to sustain its legacy and to explore areas of mutual interest.
Our visit to Tanzania reverberated at the highest level at Cornell, as President Skorton is co-chair, with Professor Silas Lwakabamba from the National University of Rwanda, of a new advisory board for the Africa-U.S. Higher Education Initiative. Sir Dennis Byron, the President of the ICTR, extended an invitation to President Skorton to visit the tribunal while we were there. Although his schedule would not permit it, President Skorton expressed appreciation and interest in our work, noting the importance of our work with the ICTR and asking to be kept informed of our progress. Our visit was also undertaken with the assistance of Professor Muna Ndula, Professor of Law and Director of the Cornell Institute for African Development, who had met some of the key players.
From left: Chief of Information and Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Thomas Mills, Stuart Basefsky, ICTR President Sir Dennis Bryon, Claire Germain
While consulting for the ICTR in Tanzania we were able to make short trips to other important organizations including the East African Court of Justice, the African Foundation for International Law, and the East Africa Law Society. They were very interested in hearing about our work for the ICTR and we were equally interested in the work they were engaged in.
At the Tribunal we learned about the different facets of their work and explained what kinds of things were being done at Cornell. We talked about our experience with the Nuremberg trial transcripts and other materials. It was on the basis of that very experience with the Donovan archive of Nuremberg materials that we had been invited to the ICTR. That and our Liberia collection were of particular importance and relevance to the task at hand.
The Donovan Nuremberg Collection
Our acquisition of the Donovan Nuremberg Collection came about by a most fortuitous but entirely serendipitous circumstance. General Donovan was the Assistant to the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson. After the trials were completed, General Donovan took the papers and had them bound into approximately 150 volumes. They sat on the shelves in his law office at Donovan & Leisure for many years and were still there long after his death in 1959. A young lawyer discovered them when the law firm dissolved in the 1990s and gave them to Henry Korn, a Cornell graduate who together with his wife offered them to the Law Library.
The Donovan Nuremberg Collection of trial transcripts and other materials which were declassified in the 1990s had not been seen for over 50 years. We were delighted to accept the collection and began by creating a detailed index to the materials. We digitized part of the collection and posted it and the index on the Internet. Nearly overnight we were receiving requests from scholars all over the world for more information about the collection and appointments to visit. The Rwanda Tribunal saw our Nuremberg collection online and picked up the phone to call me. Several months later we found ourselves in Tanzania advising on the preservation of the papers from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. (Above, Mount Meru, the tenth highest mountain in Africa)
From left: Thomas Mills, Chief of Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Senior Legal Officer Roland Adjovi, Judge Bossa, Claire Germain
Liberian Law Collection
From the mid 1950s to 1979 the Liberian Codification Project was led by Cornell professor Milton Konvitz, Professor at Law and ILR. For over two decades Professor Konvitz collected documents in Liberia and brought them back to Cornell. Later Law Librarian Jane Hammond visited Liberia in the 1980s to assist with the organization of their National Law Library. Among the documents in the Konvitz archive at Cornell are early constitutions, a complete history of Liberia’s statutory law, and both working papers and final drafts of the codification project.
After the destruction of virtually all legal materials during the Liberian civil war, the Konvitz archive assumed even greater importance as the unique repository of the statutory history of Liberia. In recent years the Law Library has been working on the important and urgent goal to re-establish the rule of law in Liberia with various groups including the United Nations Mission in Liberia, the office of the U.S. State Department in Monrovia, and the Carter Center at Emory University. See the February 2007 issue of Kaleidoscope for more about our Liberian Law Collection.
The ICTR in Tanzania
Our five days at the ICTR were long and filled with meetings, presentations, and excursions to neighboring groups and offices. We were able to provide specific information on the following topics:
Our Donovan Nuremberg Collection and the Liberia/Konvitz Collection, what we have in these archives and how they are organized, what’s online;
Foundations and organizations with a reputation for funding preservation initiatives and especially for funding projects in Africa;
Internet resources for legal research;
How to organize online resources, how we organize our Web site at Cornell Law Library;
The variety of legal research training that can be offered to ICTR staff and their affiliates;
How to organize an archive; comparison of materials from the Office of the Prosecutor with our Liberia/Konvitz archive;
How to analyze data on Web site usage using methods employed at Cornell Law Library to analyze our homepage usage;
Free online legal resources in general and Web portals;
Large-scale digitization at Cornell, what has been done and what we have learned.
Throughout our visit we were struck by the urgency of the transition prompted by the closing of the Tribunal and the great need to keep genocide information centers available not only in Rwanda but throughout Africa. Archives and the personal papers of judges were of paramount importance.
The ICTR building above; and standing in front of the ICTR building, from left: Stuart Basefsky, Law School intern, Claire Germain, Chief Librarian Angeline Djampou, Chief of Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Thomas Mills
We met with the President of the ICTR, Sir Dennis Byron; Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow; staff of the Office of the Prosecutor; Head of the Judicial and Legal Services Division Pascal Besnier; staff of the Defence Counsel and Detention Management Section; members of the Witnesses and Victims Support Section; Chief Librarian Angeline Djampou; Chief of Information and Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba; Senior Legal Officer Roland Adjovi; and still others. We visited the Detention Center.
When we met with President Byron he asked us both to help identify the judges’ needs and to assist in conceptualizing the usefulness of an archive of their papers. Stuart explained how the library where the archive is located is responsible for its long term care but stressed to them that the control of the archives rests with the giver. Based on his experience at ILR he was able to advise on how to organize their papers and to provide model forms and contracts.
Outcomes and Future Steps
The profile of the Tribunal has already been raised since that trip to Tanzania last June. President Byron was invited to speak at the Cornell Club in NYC in October 2009 by the Law School and ILR, coordinated and organized by Professor Samuel Bacharach, and he was invited by the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice to speak at their spring symposium in Washington, D.C. last month (March 2010). Chief of the ICTR Information and Evidence Section Ayodeji Fadugba will speak at the upcoming American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado in July 2010 and at the upcoming International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) annual meeting in Goteborg, Sweden in August of this year. These meetings alone have extended the audience of the work of the Tribunal to scholars and stakeholders worldwide.
Stuart Basefsky arranged for the communications division of the ICTR to provide him with press releases for dissemination through his electronic news service, IWS Documented Newsand through two others services: ResourceShelf.comandDocuTicker.com. We also discussed the possibility of archiving the ICTR Web site if permission were granted.
Sixty-five years after the end of World War II there has been a resurgence of interest in Holocaust studies. Going online with our Donovan Nuremberg Collection has taken us in directions we could not have foreseen when we first received the archive. It led to our collaboration with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and it has recently been used by a Rochester lawyer in preparing a case from Guantanamo Bay. Our Donovan collection will be the subject of an upcoming Cybertower video that will be available by Reunion time in June. Who knows where the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda will reside 50 years from now.
Masai mother and child
Claire Germain is Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Director of the Law Library, Professor of Law, and Director of the Dual Degree Programs Paris & Berlin.
Photographs provided by Claire Germain
