Genocide and Criminal Justice

The Kigali Genocide Memorial includes three permanent exhibitions, the largest of which documents the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. There is also a children’s memorial and an exhibition on the history of genocidal violence around the world. The education centre, gardens, and Genocide Archive of Rwanda contribute to a meaningful tribute to those who perished, and provide a powerful educational experience for visitors.

Welcome to the Genocide Archive of Rwanda website. Here you will find our digital collection of items related to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, pre-genocide history and post-genocide reconstruction processes. Our materials are also preserved and accessible at our physical archive which is located at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.

" The Rwanda Documents Project was started by Professor Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota as a result of his work as a defense attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The goal of the Project is to collect and make available primary source materials from international and national agencies, governments, and courts that relate to the political and social history of Rwanda from 1990 to the present. "

Compiled by Concordia University's Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies

From Clinton Presidential Library archive

"The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is the memorial site of the S-21 interrogation and detention center of the Khmer Rouge regime. Located in the heart of Phnom Penh, it preserves a tragic period in history with the aim to encourage visitors to be messengers of peace."

"The Killing Fields Memorial Museum was founded by Dara Duong, a survivor from the 1975-1979 Killing Fields of Cambodia. There were five family members including his father that were killed by the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot) regime"

The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) is the world’s largest repository of printed documents and other original documentary materials relating to the DK regime. The materials in our archives are consequently of the utmost historical interest and may serve as important evidentiary materials in any accountability process relating to the Democratic Kampuchea regime.

"The Museum of Memory and Human Rights seeks to draw attention to human rights violations committed by the Chilean state between 1973 and 1990. Its mission is to allow dignity for victims and their families, stimulate reflection and debate and to promote respect and tolerance in order that these events never happen again."

"For more than a decade, the Chile Documentation Project set a standard for declassified evidence and impact, becoming a model for responding to challenges and opportunities for truth, justice, and accountability in Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia, where the Archive has also pursued substantive declassification projects."

Some archived documents coming from the Nixon Presidential library pertaining to the United States' involvement with Pinochet.

"The National Security Archive launched the Guatemala Documentation Project in 1994, after peace negotiators seeking to end Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict agreed to establish a truth commission. The project's first objective was to support the human rights investigations of the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission by forcing the declassification and release of secret U.S. government files on decades of repression and state violence in Guatemala." Through George Washington University

"A product of broad international collaboration, these digitized documents from the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) aim to facilitate scholarly and legal research into a vast cache of historical documentation. The discovery of the National Police Historical Archive in 2005 opened an extensive and timely resource for the study of Guatemalan history and human rights in the region, spanning a broad array of topics from Guatemala's armed conflict between 1960 and 1996 to the sexually transmitted disease experiments performed at the behest of the United States government in the 1940s. This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive. This digital archive mirrors and extends the physical archive that remains preserved in Guatemala as an important historical patrimony of the Guatemalan people." Through University of Texas

"The Guatemala News and Information Bureau (GNIB) was an activist and solidarity group based in San Francisco, California, created in 1978 to support and inform the public about Guatemalan movements for peace and justice, indigenous rights, and labor rights. To support its activities, the GNIB systematically collected a wide variety of materials documenting all aspects related to the civil war in that country, including human rights abuses and the social and political responses to state sponsored violence. Also documented were the negotiations and the implementation of the Peace Accords signed in the mid 1990s. The result was an unparalleled archive of gray literature (published and unpublished documents, pronouncements, action alerts, press releases, flyers, newsclippings, correspondence, and other types of ephemeral material), serials, and policy reports representing the actions and views of activist groups, government officers and politicians, journalists, international solidarity groups, as well as revolutionary organizations. The Princeton University Library digitized over 11,000 items from the archive in collaboration with the Cooperative Digitization of International Research Materials (CDIRM) project, organized by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)." Princeton

Report by Guatemala's historical Clarification Commission

"The cases here represent areas of focus for the Simon-Skjodt Center and are not an exhaustive list of mass atrocities in the past and present. You will find information here on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities, places where mass atrocities are currently underway or populations are under threat, and areas where early warning signs call for concern and preventive action."

"The Genocide Documentation Project launched in January 2013 in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and explores the failures of the international community to prevent or effectively respond to past cases of genocide. Through detailed case studies of Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur, the project examines the role of the international community in these incidents of genocidal violence and helps shape the views of a new generation of policymakers both within the United States and around the world."

This website provides case studies of endings (alpha listing of cases) assembled in this of “very massive atrocities,” defined as widespread and systematic killing of unarmed people (civilians or prisoners of war) within a single country resulting in at least 50,000 civilian fatalities in cases post-1945.