TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 4

Chapter 2

Subsection 8

LESSONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

89. The Commission notes that the issue of exhumations is a sensitive one, requiring further work. The Commission will hand the Ministry of Justice a comprehensive report on the work of the task team, detailing successful exhumations, problematic exhumations and a list of the exhumations that still need to be carried out.

90. The Commission notes, for the benefit of the agencies that will carry out exhumations in the future, the lessons that have been learnt through the exhumation process:

Dealing with families, relatives and communities

91.Any investigation or exhumation carried out by any body or structure must be done in consultation with the families or their representatives, and the community.

92. Prior to any exhumation, families should be approached for ante-mortem information.

93. Undignified or unskilful handling of remains may further traumatise families.

94. Families must be given a realistic expectation of the outcome of any investigation or exhumation – given the state of the remains, the number of bodies and problems with identification.

95. Families must be provided with proper information and psychological support.

96. The subsequent process of identification must be explained to the families.

97. The families must be told whether the identification process will rely on simple or traditional techniques or whether more sophisticated technology will be used. In this regard, it is important to advise that sophisticated technology will only be used if it is available and necessary for the process.

98. The notion of what constitutes a family may vary with cultural context. In addition, clear guidelines need to be developed to deal with divided families.

Dealing with identification responsibly

99. In carrying out exhumations, the identification process is critically important.

100. The EAAF²⁸ has stated that ‘the habitual and in our view mistaken procedure often followed is to open a grave first, and conduct the rest of the investigation afterwards’. The investigation and exhumation process should, in their view, be broken into three phases, each of which is intimately connected to the others:

a Prior to the exhumation taking place, there should be an investigation of the oral and written sources, which allows for the construction of the case history and a working hypothesis.

b The fieldwork phase includes the retrieval of the body and associated evidence, whether from the site of the discovery or from a regular grave.

c In the laboratory work phase, the corresponding analysis of remains and other physical evidence should be carried out.

101. In this regard, it will be important for any structure carrying out exhumations to take the following steps into account:

a ‘Identification’ is defined as ‘individualisation by the attribution of birth,name or other appropriate name to human remains’.²⁸

b Identification is one aspect of the investigation into a death, which seeks answers to other questions (e.g. the cause of death).

c An identification can generally be made in three different ways:

i. visual or customary (relatives or acquaintances viewing the remains, identity documents or tags);

ii. the weight of circumstantial evidence (matching of ante-mortem data with information collected during the examination), and

iii. scientific/objective methods (use of dental records, fingerprints or DNA).

102. These three steps do not necessarily follow on one another. However, the usual practice is that, as identification becomes more difficult, the emphasis moves from one to the other. Where possible, visual identification should be complemented by any one of the other two methods. Whatever the approach to identification, it must be adapted to the context.

103. The identification of human remains through DNA typing should be undertaken when other investigative techniques of identification prove inadequate.