TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 10

Subsection 10

■ THE POLICY FRAMEWORK

17 The activities of the Human Rights Violations Committee, namely the hosting of public victim hearings and the not-so-public processing of victim statements by the information management system, took place within the policy framework.

Public victim hearings

18 The most visible activity of the Human Rights Violations Committee was its public victim hearings programme, which commenced on 15 April 1996 in East London. The rapid proliferation of public victim hearings necessitated the scheduling and streamlining of pre-hearings preparation. This required a number of steps, which included making information available in each area in which statements were to be taken, the logistics of statement taking, the briefing of statement takers, statement taking and follow-up visits after the hearings.

19 The statements themselves were processed in accordance with the policy developed for the database.

20 In addition, an extraordinary number of operational considerations had to be taken into account when hosting the hearings. An important concern of the Human Rights Violations Committee was to ensure that the human and civil dignity of victims was restored by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of violations (as emphasised in section 3(1)(c) of the Act). It was, therefore, incumbent on the Human Rights Violations Committee to make sure that the environment at the hearing was conducive to achieving these objectives. Two examples illustrate the kinds of sensitivities that were enshrined in the policy.

21 First, the Committee had to ensure the availability of appropriate translation services for victim testimony. It was policy that victims should be allowed to tell their stories in the language of their choice, even if such languages fell outside of the eleven official languages of South Africa. The multi-lingual nature of South African society posed the unique challenge of ensuring that all the victims testifying across the country enjoyed the same access to translation services. However, the shortage of translation services meant that hearings schedules had to be carefully co-ordinated. To this end, the Committee later decided to allocate to each region a specific week of the month for hearings. The translation service could then travel between regions and be available for all hearings.

22 A second illustration of contextual and victim-sensitive policy development, within the context of public hearings, was the provision of adequate psychosocial support services (in co-operation with the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee) for victims before they testified. Victims selected to give public testimony were debriefed before and after the hearing by specially trained Commission personnel known as briefers. The briefers accompanied the victim throughout the process of public testimony, ever ready to be the shoulder on which victims could lean for emotional support.

23 It was also anticipated that commissioners, committee members and staff involved in the public hearing process might be affected by the collective trauma of receiving and processing victim testimony. To this end, the Commission employed mental health specialists to facilitate the debriefing of those involved.

Processing of victims’ statements

24 The most time-consuming and costly (though invisible) activity of the Human Rights Violations Committee was the information gathering and processing operation, known as ‘Infocom’.

25 The collection of data was done manually by trained statement takers who were required to deal sensitively with the person giving the statement. In many instances, the person testifying would be disclosing his or her experiences of gross human rights violations for the first time. It was also realised that 90 per cent of the victims coming to the Commission would not be appearing at a public hearing and that their experience of the Commission would be through making a statement to one of the Commission’s statement takers. It was, therefore, important to ensure that statement takers were able both to act with empathy and to record accurately the stories told to them by victims.

26 In order to capture this data, the Commission opted for an information management system that used an electronic database, as opposed to the traditional manual hard copy or cardex system approach to data management. In order for such a process to work, standard operating procedures needed to be developed.

27 Statement taking needs to be seen against the broader backdrop of other information gathering processes: for example, section 29 investigative enquiries or the receiving of written submissions from political parties and others. The above discussion on the hosting of public victim hearings and processing of victim statements shows how the Human Rights Violations Committee had to use broad sensitivities in order to develop policy on what often seemed, at first glance, to be basic operational procedures.