 Tonight, welcome to everybody to tonight's Sir Michael Howard Center event. This is the first event in our new series on conflict records, and it's an appropriate evening to launch the first in what will be a series of events related to conflict records, and also to, at this stage, informally launch our conflict records unit. I'm Professor Joe Maolo, director of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the Study of War, and I'm going to be introducing in a moment Dr. Michael Innis, who is now the new director of the Conflict Records Unit, and he'll be introducing tonight's speaker. The one thing I just wanted to emphasize is that this is the one-year anniversary since we held in the college chapel Sir Michael Howard's memorial service for Sir Michael Howard, and I want to also underscore just how appropriate it is that we're launching the Conflict Records Unit this evening. I think it's going to be an enormous tribute to Sir Michael Howard's work as a historian and continue his appreciation for the study of war and modern war in all of its dimensions, and particularly with an emphasis on, of course, the historical study of war and the importance of archives, records, and empirical materials. So with that, let me just turn everything over to Michael Innis. Thanks, Joe. I'm Michael Innis. I'm director of the Conflict Records Unit, and thank you for joining us. Joe has just introduced us. Dr. William Wiley is our guest. Bill is the executive founder and executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. I suppose before I start introducing that, I should say a word or two about the unit and about the speaker series. The unit's new. It's something that we've set up in the last few months, and we have some pretty serious ambitions for what we want to achieve with it. The basic remit is to develop and host Conflict Records, to make use of them for research, and also to take a look at the phenomenon and research the legal and moral and ethical and best practice in terms of research using Conflict Records. For those of you who are not au fait with the terminology, Conflict Records is a little bit of an intellectual fad, but with a deep history. In its narrowest sense, it's about captured enemy records. In its broadest sense, it is primary sources, as historians would understand them, generated by parties to a conflict. And we, I think, differentiate the Conflict Records Unit in that we're looking at the entire spectrum. We're quite interested in, as historians and primary sources, of course, but as students and scholars of war in all its forms, we're quite interested in making sure we sort of cover the spectrum and understand how this works in different ways, in different time periods, and in different conflicts. And our focus tonight is something very contemporary, and that is what Bill and I will be talking about, and it'll be more of a conversation rather than Bill giving a talk and then Q&A period. So it'll be informal back and forth, I think, between Bill and I. I should mention that this is the first event that we are holding. We have a speaker series that we'll be kicking off in September of this year, and we'll be holding a monthly speaker series. Our first will be Thomas Hegghammer, who is one of the world's leading scholars on jihadi movements, and he'll be talking about the jihadi document repository that has been set up at the University of Oslo, and then we have a monthly speaker thereafter through to the spring of 2022, covering quite a few different types of record sets and archives and documentation projects and conflicts. And I think we'll be posting a link to that event series so that people are aware and can see for themselves, and there it is. Okay, I think I've covered the basics. With that, I want to do a brief introduction of Bill, but I don't want to speak for him. Bill has been profiled in press extensively over the last, I suppose, going on a decade in relation to his work with Sija, Sija being the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. You'll hear us saying Sija quite often, it's just the abbreviation of the acronym, C-I-J-A. Bill has a PhD in International Law and has been working as a criminal investigator and the lawyer, if I've got that accurately, on quite a few different sort of conflict settings and institutional settings prior to setting up Sija. And I suppose, you know, given all the, Bill, given all the public information that's out there about you, you've been profiled and famously in the New Yorker and the New York Times and all the major press, I suppose the way to start would be to ask you to tell us a little bit about the commission, tell us a little bit about Sija. You're on mute, Bill. At least I'm not a cat. Thank you very much to the unit and the center for having me. It's a real, it's actually, it's a pleasure. No one, since I was young, about the board studies program. In fact, when I finished my first degree and wanted to study overseas, I applied to the board studies program, I applied to Oxford. I was accepted to both, improbably and in the end, I went to Oxford. And within a couple of days, I met Sir Michael and he, there was, I'm really more of a historian than a law guy, or at least I was. And I'll come back to that. And it was a cocktail party or something for the new history grad students. And I was then, and frankly now, I went to cocktail parties where I don't know anyone. And I certainly knew who Sir Michael was from my undergraduate readings. It was very fond of military history. And he approached me and said, hi, I'm Michael Howard, I'm pleased to meet you. And of course, I couldn't talk. I was completely intimidated by what you would know better than me was a wonderful man. And I hadn't realized it was the anniversary of his memorial service. And at any rate, he was, I don't know if he was my moral tutor or something like that, but I was summoned to see him periodically and I would sit in his office and he was quite a bit shorter than me, but he seemed taller and always in my mind's eye. And I still couldn't talk. I don't think I ever uttered a sensible word to Sir Michael in all my interactions with him. But hopefully, now speaking at his center and with the conflict records, you know, do better tonight. Just to add to my background, I really was trained as a historian rather than a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I do have a law degree, but I don't have a practicing certificate. I came up through the system of international criminal law, international crimes, through the intelligence analyst and investigative streams. And I have occasionally worked as a legal advisor internationally, but the focus today will be much more on wherever you want to take it, Mike, but it'll be much more on the nuances of case building and investigations rather than prosecutions. And indeed in part because we don't have that many perpetrators yet from the wars in Syria and Iraq who've been prosecuted. Now, what is the Sija, with that long-winded introduction to go back to your question? Sija is the first, and through the time being still only, but I hope that will change, private international criminal investigative body. It was, it came out of the initial engagement in Syria of in 2011 and 12 of a company that I owned and another company that was owned by a colleague from the Yugoslavia Tribunal from the old days. And my colleague was asked by the foreign office in 2011 to do some human rights stuff in Syria. And my colleague rang me because his skill set was a bit different than mine and said, do you want to do some human rights stuff in Syria? And I said, no, I'm a criminal investigator. I'm not a human rights guy, but if the foreign office wants something done, then what we'll do is we'll sensitize and try to harness the tremendous energy of the civil society of an individuals on the opposition side of the confrontation lines at that time. We'll try to harness that energy in a way to collect prime-face evidence with an eye to the future prosecution of, at that time we were focused solely on the Syrian regime. And the foreign office, the answer came back from the foreign office, God bless them, they're still a donor to this day. Yeah, that's fine, just get out there and do something and off we went. And after a few months of dealing with these individuals in Syria, the idea presented itself at least to my mind that we could create a private criminal investigative body that would act as a bridge between, if you will, the offenses being perpetrated at that time and the public sector, whether it be domestic or national war crimes units and the international community coming up with its own criminal investigative and prosecutorial structure, such as had been the Yugoslavian Tribunal, Rwandan Tribunal and the rest. So the idea was effectively that we would build cases, collect prima facie evidence, build cases and such that when, because the regime was losing the war for about 2012, when an international court tribunal was established, the office of the prosecutor of that body would hit the ground running. And that is still the siege objective, it's the model we apply in Syria still, these would be the Syrian regime. Since 2014 in Syrian Iraq, these would be a dash of Islamic State and in our other operational theaters. It's effectively extending the reach of the public sector into high risk environments where they would have limited or no freedom of movement with an eye to criminal investigative work, such that the public sector can ultimately take over from us and see that perpetrators of court international crimes are ultimately prosecuted. Oh, what happens? I'm interested in the impetus for the creation of Sija. You described a set of circumstances where you happen to be more or less in the right place at the right time. But I think the bigger story involves some of your previous experience working for various courts. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. I suppose it's a little bit deeper background but of interest, I think. Yeah, the formative experience with respect to putting the seeds in my mind for what ultimately became Sija was my time at the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2005. I was the first investigator retained by the court when it was operationalized in 2003. I came over from the ICTY, the U.S. lobbying tribunal. And here was the first time that I had worked and indeed any international court tribunal had operated vis-a-vis the offenses or the perpetrators, the suspects, in, if you will, real time. And everything else was one way or another in my career and the other courts in which I didn't work was a post-conflict response. So Yugoslavia tribunal, Rwanda tribunal, special court for Sierra Leone, the Cambodia, extraordinary chambers of the courts of Cambodia was established decades after the mass murder of Paul Pot, his crew in Cambodia and so forth. And what we found with the ICC operations, I was the first case we did and what I worked on for my two years was in the Eastern and the Congo, Eastern BRC. What we found is that the security situation was such that even though the handful of colleagues that I had at that time and myself, we had quite a bit of freedom of movement there because the court was so new it hadn't put a lot of security restrictions on us. That came a bit later after I'd left. But there was still risks that complicated the process of gathering prime facial evidence. So we got around a fair bit ourselves but what we effectively tried to do in an quite an informal way, we're spending most of our time in the Eastern Congo as investigators was trying to harness the local NGO capacity to get into areas that we particularly as Westerners couldn't discreetly access. And we could, from our base in the East, we could run sensitive sources and that kind of thing but physical access, even where the risk was acceptable what was the problem? Because even in that case, we roll in with Bangladeshi, BMP, ADs and all this stuff or fly-ins is completely indiscreet. So the question, so I went off to Iraq from there to work as a legal advisor in the Iraqi high tribunal but whilst I was still in Iraq, I wrote a book chapter actually with former colleague from the ICC setting out in theoretical terms what became the ICC, the CIGA model, CG model. Now it's much more involved than that book chapter vision as it's turned out, but the idea is that the public institution harnesses in some way domestic capacity en masse such that the disadvantages of being foreign to an operational theater, particularly the security disadvantages would be, as we found in practice, largely overcome. So, and what I argued in that chapter with my colleague, my erstwhile colleague was that I made a, we made a very minor case that ultimately the future of international criminal investigations and prosecutions where they were undertaken in, if you will, real time would ideally rest on public private partnerships. And the public component is understood as international domestic law enforcement. The private, we didn't envision a commercial model though frankly there are sieges of the nonprofit but there's nothing wrong with that to my mind. But we envision the effectively harnessing civil society capability and it's worked marvelously well. It's much faster because of the freedom of movement and because it's, CG is a private organization and it's much more flexible in its hiring policies and where people aren't needed anymore because of change of operational focus and holding apart. If we don't have jobs for them, they can be back home readily. And of course the salary and benefit packages do not approach those of international public service, not even close. I think some of those points we're gonna be coming back to later in the chat, especially the CG model. Could you walk us through some of the, in broad strokes at least and what you can say some of the mechanics about how CG works in the field in the office and beyond. Yeah, the structure of CG is very similar to an office of the prosecutor in any of the international courts of tribunals. It's more or less consciously mimics those structures because the mission is effectively the same. The one difference is we don't obviously have a prosecution division. We employ law lawyers, international lawyers because we do prepare a prosecution case to hand it off to our partners. So there is legal analytical work done but the bulk of the resources go into collection. So the vast majority of CG personnel are employed. If you take our Syria operations at their peak, let's say the Syrian regime crimes team probably had about 70 personnel. 40 of those, actually 45 or even 50 of those would have been deployed in Syria. Then at top that you would have six or eight headquarters analysts, then a sprinkling of lawyers, some operational support people in neighboring states, the state's neighboring Turkey, excuse me, Syria, and so forth. So pretty soon you get a big team that get operating vis-a-vis only one institutional target that being the Syrian regime. The DASH team at its peak was probably about 50 personnel. And in fact, it's still about 50 personnel. So again, the vast majority of them deployed in Syria and also Iraq. So the key thing first is collection of prime facial evidence. What we're looking for first and foremost is documentation, paper documentation generated by perpetrating structures. So whether it's DASH or the Syrian regime just to take those two examples, but it's the same in any other conflict or any other institutional target. We're looking for political materials, military materials and security intelligence materials. So we don't have any interest in the disaster or the driver's license registration bureau and all this sort of stuff. So with the Syrian regime's concerns, we've extracted from Syria about 1.1 million pages of paper, pieces of paper. It's, it must be now about five tarners of metric tons of paper. That's all we've brought back into Europe and digitalized. There is a paper archive, the analyst for the most part worked for the digital print or version. They do have access to the archive as they need it. The paper archive. So that's really the key because historically, since Nuremberg, any big quality international criminal prosecution is going to be based on paper generated by the perpetrating structures, the security intelligence structures, the military structures. Where that kind of paper is absent, you're going to be heavily dependent on witness testimony and all the problems that go with witness testimony, whether it's what we call crime-based witnesses, colloquially, perhaps known as victim witnesses, people who are victimized or eyewitnesses to the victimization of others. As any other witness, they're mistaken in fact and frequently, oftentimes in desire to help the prosecution at the investigative stage, they may provide helpful information that I believe is helpful, but in fact, it's not true or it's hearsay, but it's not presented as such as hearsay. And the key witnesses in building an international criminal case are what we call linkage witnesses or typically, perhaps known by you as insider witnesses. These are men, almost always men who serve within the perpetrating structures. And of course, they're always problematical. They're going to be keen to avoid prosecution themselves and have all manner of reasons to not so much to embellish the truth, but to deflect attention from themselves to others by truthful or very often untruthful means. So the key is, as I said, to gather documentation generated by the perpetrating structures because it tends to be honest. And it's those volumes of massive volumes of paper that we're looking for, any international investigative body is looking for that make those institutions very heavily dependent if they're properly structured on analysts. Many of whom, like my dad, have trained, are trained as historians or at least have studied history. So I noticed that where Gash is concerned, it generated a lot of paper. We haven't got our hands on all of it as yet in that field, but there is a lot that's in the right hands. But that process is ongoing with an eye to effective law enforcement measures, particularly in the West. But Gash generated a lot of computer files. So it was very bureaucratic in its structures. It did aspire to be a state as the name suggests, Islamic State. Its leadership was heavily Iraq-based or largely Iraqi for most of its life and its peak. Iraq is a very, very bureaucratic state. So it reflected that aspect of Iraqi political culture. But the Gash adherents tended to be very young and certainly the Westerners and many of the Middle Eastern boys that found their way to Gash tended to be computer literate. So what we found with Gash is a tremendous amount of document, physical evidence, documentation, if you will, but it was only ever in electronic form. So this is something separate and apart from, say, videos, photographs. I mean, obviously we collect all that stuff, but nominal rules, payrolls, each peaks relatively anodine, but when put together orders of battle, once it's all put together, it gives you very, very, gives the analyst very, very good understanding of the structures of the C3 arrangements, the command control communications arrangements within those structures. And indeed the rank and file of those structures. So the key then is the pointy end, the collection capability, as it's already intimated, it feeds into the analytical component because 85% of the international criminal case-building process is effectively involves the reconstruction of those perpetrating structures. Very, a surprisingly small amount of the resources in building these cases, 10, 15%, depending on the case, goes into looking at crimes, who got killed, where, how, and that sort of thing. That's actually a very small and conceptually equates, conceptually in terms of execution, quite a simple component of the case-building process. The key is building the linkage case, the links and the chain between the physical perpetration of the criminal acts, the murders, the sexual offenses and so forth. Going up the chain of command, so hence the need to understand the structure to the top guys, the guys in charge of those perpetrating structures, because ultimately international criminal prosecutions, if all is going according to the plan and there's proper leadership of the institutions, are targeting those most responsible for the crimes. They shouldn't be looking at low-level ranking file case. It's not going to be some resources in the international context. You mentioned paper and you elaborated and talked about information evidence that's born digital. I guess the obvious question for this researcher community is, where's it coming from? How's it accessed? How's it sourced? To the extent that you can actually discuss that in a forum like this, I guess that's the more nuts and bolts kind of question that I'm sure everybody's sort of interested in hearing a little bit about. Well, to give some real world examples, with the Syrian regime and Daesh, effectively it's sourced in, has been sourced in two ways. Seja in Syria and indeed in Iraq made established state-facult partnerships with armed groups. That's our modest operandi everywhere. And Seja's not a human rights body. It's a criminal investigative body. So operating in very high-risk environments. So we can't investigate everybody. It's simply not possible because we have no friends. We need friends. We can't move. We wouldn't get any evidence. We have been criticized for that. From a moral perspective, I do understand the criticism, but my retort has been that the Seja model is there and others can replicate it. It's not copyrighted and investigate groups that we work with or Seja's not for whatever reason investigating. Now there's always been a limit to who we'll work with. So when this front emerged in 2013 in Syria, that was the official al-Qaeda syndicate to a branch in Syria. When it emerged, it was extremely radical and, of course, serious threat to our people because of our Western influence. Sejas of Western-led institution, a little majority of our personnel are Syrian, Iraqi, and so forth. And so we stayed quite clear of Nusrat's front, but when what became daft, your Islamic State broke away from Nusrat in 2014, Nusrat was very much a Syrian organization. It was still quite conservative, but the rough radical jihadi elements of Nusrat, if I can put it that way, had gone with a dash. And there was franchises, if you will, of Nusrat because it had no centralized command and control element that we could have worked with. They weren't terribly criminal. The only reason we didn't work with them is because they remained a designated terrorist organization. But from a, if you will, a moral or ethical point of view, it's something that we would have looked at if they weren't a terrorist organization. Now there's been other groups in Syria that are not terribly ideological on the opposition side. They're obviously not designated terrorist organizations, but we stayed clear of because their human rights record was not ideal. But we had a great many operational partners in the early days. The military configuration has changed immensely over the years, but we had a great many partners in the early days and effectively when the regime was on the defensive, effectively from late 2012 until the Russian intervention in September 2015, particularly with its Russian air power, which put the opposition on the defensive. And that's where it remains to this day. Our de facto partners, those that we worked with were overrunning large swathes of Syrian regime territory and the regime was leaving behind documents. It's actually quite difficult to burn paper in a barrel or something. Anyone's trying to do it. As I did when our program in Iraq was shutting down, it's actually really hard to burn huge amounts of paper in a burn barrel, for example, or a barbecue or something. It's incredibly time consuming. So the regime often, personnel often fled at short notice and that would leave, say, brigade headquarters, battalion headquarters. I mean, battalion headquarters wouldn't have much of an archive, but brigade headquarters would, not a forward headquarters, but a proper, expanded headquarters, a particularly security intelligence facility, I wouldn't say the vast majority, but if I had to guess, I'd say 70% of the 1.1 million pages of material we hold, possibly more, is security intelligence material, taken from static facilities where the personnel who occupied it normally had fled at a fairly short notice. So the principal issue was not, aside from sensitizing the groups that we were there and wanted to get our hands on our stuff on this stuff, the principal issue at the beginning when the Free Syrian Army units, there were our principal partners at the start, who were so badly armed and very brave, in military terms, extremely amateurish in terms of their tactics and so forth, and to a degree, I think, disciplined. They would get into these places and they were looking for weapons and ammunition because they needed it, but then they were setting a light and dancing around and putting videos on YouTube. It was driving us crazy and we finally got them around to the position fairly quickly that, look, take what you want, give us a chance to get the documents out first or you do it, oftentimes they do it for us as the SOP took hold across a huge part of the opposition. And if you wanna put the place of fire and dance or I'm putting it on YouTube, then go ahead. So the key to acquiring electronic devices and paper documentation has always been our partnerships with our groups in Syria and indeed elsewhere. And to a degree, we've never done it with a Syrian regime. We've had one case in particular where a de-factor came out from Damascus from a very high level committee chaired by President Assad with quite a volume of minutes of meetings of that committee. But then of course, there's the Caesar files that everyone's aware of, the pictures of thousands and thousands of principally men who were perished in security intelligence detention facilities. That was not a siege operation, I hasten to add. But it was too dangerous to run sensitive sources in the Syrian regime. We were quite successful at doing it where we chose to do it within Daesh structures because Daesh had a great many adherents at its peak who were really there for opportunistic reasons or reasons of self-preservation. So as dangerous as Daesh was, it was much less difficult than you might envision to penetrate those structures securely or relatively securely and acquire information in that way. So it's basically those two ways are how we get the key forms, the key evidence. This is a question I was gonna bring up later but it strikes me that this is a good time to ask it now partly because there was a story that was just published. I think it was in the New Republic about the trauma that historians undergo in documenting and writing accounts of things like genocide and other horrific historical events. And I guess this is a bit of a tangent to the mechanics that we're talking about but on the field side, I mean, this is dangerous work. If I'm correct me if I'm wrong but CJ has lost people, you're operating in the middle of a war zone. That's traumatic enough but then you've also got people looking at the evidence of this documented evidence of this, in a far away remote place, physically safe but they're having to digest all of this. Is that something that you can comment on? I just wanna kind of the moral impact I suppose what kinds of trauma that your people have to, you have to deal with the kind of risks you have to deal with physically and psychically, I suppose. I think to look at CJ or any office of prosecutor internationally or you think domestic police force, it's analogous to what I remember from my military days is that now of course, there's professional support available and support in all institutions but it's ultimately, at least for what I can see from CJ, it's ultimately peer support. So initially there's people who get into this field, the men and women who get into this field and stay with it, they're attracts, if you will, a certain type unless anyone's a saint. But the tracks, adventures, people are interested in unusual work. There's somehow self-selective element the building of these institutions on an individual basis. And then it's definitely peer support. And that, it sounds like a cliche but that becomes a leadership issue. So CJ is quite big. Don't, for years now, we've been up around 150 personnel, like we attached last now, 140 or something. So I, you know, and people are spread around the world. So I don't even know if anyone works for CJ and medical, to be honest. You send the message down that sometimes overtly, that's the responsibility of supportive leaders and managers to keep an eye on the people, to make sure they're getting some lead. Are people deployed in Syria or Iraq and elsewhere? To, especially the men who have been in Syria to get them out of Syria from time to time. Iraq, we generally don't bring our people out of Iraq, but I think it's certainly, you don't know Mike and many of the people watching today will know there's sectors in Iraq that are, especially Northern Iraq, that are considerably safer than parts of the country. It's, you know, they're maybe not as much to do, but they want to be or just hang out in a peaceful place. That's evidently doable. So in the headquarters, making sure our personnel are taking enough leave. We often find with some of our people in the field, including the internationals that we have deployed, that it'll be, I don't know quite how to put it, but it'll be a bit cranky, yeah? And they'll lash out and typically, they're not entirely men, but they're mostly men. Maybe not quite my age, but in their 40s or 50s, generally ex-military or they have a background in the security services of both in their home country. And these are individuals with a lot of self-discipline. So as soon as we see that crankiness, it's not, the instinct is not to punish the individual for the insubordinate, I can put it that way. First instinct is, it looks like they need a last. And I'll send them over or get them somewhere else for a while. And then technically they're fine. So I suppose one should say that now we have two staff psychologists and stuff like that, let's be quite honest. The psychologist, someone going to a psychologist is good if they need to go, but that's where things have gotten a bit too far. If you will, peer support hasn't been sufficient. The leadership has been insufficient. I'm not saying there'll be a case where someone needs professional help, but if it is repeatedly the case then clearly it is a failed institutional failure. So ultimately mine in the case of student. I've got a bunch more questions about the mechanics, about the implications of your work, about the larger sort of ecosystem of, I guess, knowledge workers and investigators of various kinds historically and contemporaneously. But we've got a suggestion given the time we've almost been going for an hour now that we should probably move to Q and A and take some questions. And I think anything that I wanted to ask if it comes up in the questions and then if it doesn't I can interject periodically. But if that's okay with you, we can open things up to Q and A. The way we'll work is any of the audience who want to ask questions, please drop your questions into the chat function. And I have instructions to weave my questions into, I will. But yeah, what we'll do is anybody who's attending, who's listening in, who's watching, please drop the questions into the chat function and we'll field them from there. I'm not seeing anything so far. I'm assuming it's open to everybody. It's in the Q and A box. There we go, okay, thank you. Can you see them as well, Bill? I'm looking at them now. Okay, do you want to just start working through them or? You're really lost, Mike. Okay, first one from, I'm just going to go in the order that I'm seeing them from Juliette. Could you ask when you think it's appropriate to see if you're participating in the Koblenz trial? Yeah, that's a good point. As we're speaking there are headlines right now but a trial in Germany, a landmark, a conviction, I think, that was based in part on evidence that SIGIA contributed. And I think the question is if SIGIA participated and was SIGIA involved to help? Yeah, this is a general question. Yeah, thanks, G. Reakti, for mayors. Certainly is a timely question. For those who don't know, there's been a trial ongoing for 20 years now, maybe a bit last, in Koblenz, Germany, resuming universal jurisdiction. There's two men on trial, what one of them was convicted today. INA is serving as Al-Garib. He was a sergeant in Syrian state security from, well, he was a career man. He defected in 2013, I believe, ultimately found his way to Germany. He was convicted today of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He was involved in arrest plots, arresting protesters and others on Syrian human restless, delivering them to a key community branch known as 2.1 in several Damascus where the main were subject to all matter of offensive murder, torture, rape and so forth. His co-cued to his name, Anwar Luslan. Luslan is, by far, the bigger and more interesting target. Luslan was full colonel in Syrian state security. He was head of interrogation, again, a career man. He was head of interrogation in 2011, a branch 251. So that means he's responsible for all interrogations in what was a massive security branch. And everything that goes with those interrogations was with Luslan and Luslan. And then he went to a specialized branch also in several Damascus, 285, as head of interrogation and ultimately defected in late 2012. His trial will be ongoing, but he will be convicted of much more serious offenses assuredly later this year. Siege's role in this trial, and I don't wanna take anything away from our colleagues in the federal police and federal prosecutors, obviously, in Germany, because they've done a magnificent job and it's their show and it's their victory. I'd like to thank the victory for the Syrian people, and I'll come back to that in a moment. Siege provided quite a bit of contextual evidence on the structure, and again, I come back to the issue of structure, the structure and leadership of branches 251 and 285, where the accused, the two accused fit into those structures. And where the case of Raslan, current Raslan is concerned, he hadn't indeed had a number of documents referring to our archive with his signature on it, his signature on the fact on interrogation protocols. So basically what Siege was able to do for our colleagues in Germany and for the court was map out the criminal contacts, point the two accused, particularly the Raslan, Raslan, Kuala Raslan into that context at a particular temporal period, and then what the Germans did on their own. And I want to note with the assistance of some other NGOs, particularly ECCHR in Berlin, they took care of what we call the crime makes. So it's been a great many witnesses who were incarcerated in branches 251 and 285, who could speak to the treatment that they received, which was, as you can imagine, exceedingly unpleasant, what those witnesses couldn't speak to was the structure of those institutions, none of them had ever seen Raslan or Al-Ghuri. And finally, one of my colleagues, Siege, director of the investigations and operations, he testified at the trial over two days. They didn't use precisely the same terminology in Germany, but he effectively testified as an expert in this, to the structures of Syrian state security, of those two security intelligence branches, and to the role of the accused, particularly Raslan. So we're really happy for, frankly, for the Syrian people to see this initial conviction because it's the first part in history anywhere in the world where a Syrian government security intelligence official has been held to account for current international crimes. And even though Al-Ghuri is something that nobody, as opposed to Raslan, that's a really big thing for the Syrian people. Two questions that I think, the two next questions, I think they relate to the Siege model, and I was going to ask you earlier to go into a bit more depth on what's involved with that. I think this, one is from Joanna, and that's, do you take the deposition of witnesses in the field, victims, humanitarian workers, et cetera? And the second one from Rachel is, how does Siege ensure a chain of custody is preserved when encountering voluminous documentary evidence in the middle of a war zone? Asking as the authenticity of documents and chain of command issues could be raised in international criminal proceedings. So those are the two questions. First is one. Yeah, our principal is, thank you, Joanna, and thank you, Rachel. Our principal focus, again, is on documentary evidence in paper electronic form. We interview a lot of witnesses between Syria and Iraq. I believe we've interviewed probably somewhere in the area of 4,000 witnesses. They don't make a touch last, but it's quite substantial. We don't take depositions in the formal space. You need to use your terms, Joanna. We, what we do is prepare interview reports. They're prepared in the third person, so it's not in the form of a deposition or a formal witness statement. The witness doesn't sign it. The reason it's done in the third person is because ultimately we're collecting on behalf of public law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities. So on the basis of what we don't want is contradictions between our information and only by police or prosecutors. And one of the ways, it's a legal term in a certain way, by preparing our witness interview reports in the third person, where there is an important and what is taken in the formal process by public officials, that discrepancy can be blamed on on on Syria. That it, it's our investigator or investigator missubstantialist should put the witness or doing the core things, plus an important part, because it's a principle of criminal investigations. The more times you interview a witness, and it could be the best witness in the world, and the more times that witness testimony rather testifies, you are going to have discrepancies in one form or another, which will be exploited by the defense counsel and should be exploited by the defense counsel. I see this in some of those dark areas of the defense world, because that's what makes the process fair. The second question from Rachel, can you start changing the custody? For those of you who don't know, change of custody is a process where physical evidence, the movement of physical evidence from point A to B to C to B is recorded on a form. This is a technical process. It's important, but I think I watched your little TV, but I get asked about this a lot. I'm starting to suspect that cop films and CSI stuff, maybe make a big thing of this. It's an outside effect. Yeah, okay. The book, 25 years behind in the TV, you watch it, but to that I'll get to it. The thing, the key question is... Bill, I've got a request if you could speak up a little bit. Right, yeah. Sorry. All right, we'll return to normal apologies. The key thing is that providence is establishing the providence. So when it will, the first link in the chain of custody, where did you find the material? Who found it? What date? So it's not the chain of custody as a whole that's so important. It's important, but it's important. It shouldn't be overstated. The key is the providence. And Rachel actually takes me to, her question takes me to an important point. We need to record the providence, of course. Again, that's technically very straightforward. But the key thing at the point of acquisition is to take everything, yeah? So the CDSOP from day one, when we put the SOPs in place, when the money to start collecting material was still on the way in late 2012. So we put the SOPs in place, there was to be and has never been any triage in the field. And there's two reasons for that. First, our men and women in the field aren't trained anyhow to do triage in that way. But the second reason is illegal and it's frankly a fairness reason is that aside from the fact that we don't know what we're gonna need at the point of collection from a prosecutorial point of view, but you want to, in respect of the process, you want to ensure that you have everything that's inculpatory, but also everything that's potentially ex-culpatory or ex-culpatory with respect to whoever ultimately may be accused in whole or impart on the basis of that material. So again, providence and taking everything or taking nothing. And I'll just add that the most dangerous work indeed, Mike, you've already alluded to it. For us in Syria has always been the movement of the paper, particularly in the early days because there was so many armed groups running around in the confrontation lines, we're so fluid and there were so many elements that were hostile to our work, not just the Syrian regime, not just Daesh, there's other groups that the volumes of paper we're talking about, remember I said, here literally now it must be about five times, it either takes a lot of space or if it's being man-packed in some way, it's headed. And so you only want to extract, it's the risk-reward ratio, only want to extract stuff that you think might be contributing to the building of the puzzle or one of the puzzles down the road. So obviously we would ignore driver's registration of the road or something that's never going to be relevant. But in the Syrian context, we've never taken police records and because the Syrian police, regular police, I'm not talking about security intelligence, permanent, quasi police, they have never been very much integrated into the apparatus of oppression. Syrian police generally do regular police stuff there, deal with regular crime, traffic issues and like police elsewhere. And so the risk-reward ratio of moving 100, 200 kilos of or more police records, for a particular facility, the likelihood being that that stock would not be of much use, it's not worth taking, it wouldn't be worth taking the risk. So hence we end up with the political, military and security intelligence stock, which is invariably... Bill, I've got a few questions that are in the access, somewhere between access to records and lessons learned best practices. From Aiva, a reference to a history in the ICTY, Aiva says the ICTY opened up much of its trial records for research, the only international court to do so. Would CJEI ever open up part of its archives for research, the ones that can down the line? After all, Syrian researchers, but also others should arguably have access to the archives about their own life experiences. And then I think, promise that and then move on to the next two, which are about kind of, best practices or lessons that you've identified after nearly a decade of CJEI. First, I have this question and then we can... Aiva, I apologize if I pronounced it wrong, I'm sure that I have, because I said you don't apologize, but yeah, that's a great question. I obviously have worked at the ICTY and of course, many years ago now, I'm aware of the tribunal ultimately has made, I don't believe all those records, but great many public now. In fact, one of my other colleagues here who's our head of experimental relations amongst other things, was a long time, spoke to a woman for the tribunal and had an outreach and very much involved in the process, which you're referencing at the ICTY. We're aware, I'm aware with my background as a historian or at least studying history, that we are sitting on a very important repository of material for other than purely criminal justice purposes. And ideally, it would be available as soon as possible to researchers and indeed to groups looking for the missing and so forth. There's a lot of, particularly security and intelligence, a lot of information paperwork concerning, obviously, individual prisoners. In some cases, they're all through the faith and that's not being taxed. CJ has a very narrow criminal investigative and case building mission. We've been having discussions about the ultimate access to questions for a while, but it's not a decision for me or a decision to take on its own. But ultimately, I can always be personal here, but what I'd like to see before too long, and let's say in the next year or two, is some sort of access to another institution, not through CJ because we're not set up to deal with research and so forth, and our location is secret and those other issues, but some sort of access to scholars and other interested persons along the lines of the access policies that were put in place in Central, Eastern Europe when former security intelligence archives and so forth fell into democratic hands. But ultimately, it's gonna be up to others working with CJ to do that because we don't have that kind of expertise. And frankly, dare I say, we don't have the moral authority to determine the latterly how that should work. We know our ethical responsibilities as the owners, custodians, I don't know the correct term of the material. And we believe our responsibilities aptly to make it available, but at the same time, we have a very strong ethical responsibility to protect the names in that material. And I refer to obviously the names of victims, but also the names of perpetrators or during regime officials who are not perpetrators, there's several million names in the collection. And what we don't want is the collection to become, if you will, a mine or a scene that people mine to take revenge on others. Because we saw that in Iraq when I was gonna try being there. And some documents were put up in an early trial session and they had a, there was a paramilitary force called oil protection forces that was used to suppress the 91 uprising in Iraq. And there was just some documents there and there was a couple of officers named the document major, Lieutenant Colonel. They weren't targets or suspects or on trial. And within a week, both those guys were dead. So that's the kind of thing we have to meet for the moment. We've got a question, one question from SM Dean on it's a broad question. After nearly a decade of seizure, what essentially, what essential lessons would you want to share? Similar question from Rana Ibrahim, what are Siege's best practices to train personnel and for bearing records, especially in the event of language and cultural barriers. Actually quite, one is quite broad, one specific to how you operate, but sort of lessons observed, lessons learned, best practices from Siege. Yeah, maybe three bullet points and then we can sort of scroll through the rest of the questions. Yeah, okay, so yeah, lessons learned. I mean, look, we have a lessons learned culture. We're always trying to be better. It's part of the institutional ethos. I've been in this work for quite a long time now, it's been there 25 years, that's 24 years next month, so. I can't say that from a personal perspective, I'm seeing a lot of new stuff. The principal lessons I've learned are really related to doing this privately. It's much easier to do it privately than in the public sector because of the freedom of movement and so forth, I speak from an operational perspective. But doing it privately is, on the flip side is the challenges in raising money, keeping the attention of donors, public officials in the West on whatever situation you're dealing with. You'd be surprised how institutionally politically, really it's coming from a political level, interest changed very rapidly or maybe wouldn't be surprised, but yeah, not much more than that. And the other question though, we're just flipping back the phone. That was from Rena? Yeah. Best practices and training personnel, yep. Yeah, I mean, look, CJR isn't a training institution, but we've spent millions and millions training our personnel in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Initially, it's not a lot of training, the key, there's training at the beginning and the key is really mentoring. It's learning on the job to mentoring. And so we don't use our investigators to verify records. That's at the analytical level. There's not a problem with forgeries because we collected bulk, we're not buying stuff like journalists off of Backstreet in Istanbul or Agassi in the capital or something like that. Rahanli, some of the places on the border there. We're collecting in bulk and we have so much stuff in the area that's been with us for quite a few years. They would pick up immediately if something was a forgery. All our analysts, except for the senior, most analysts are arenas. Some are Westerners who master Arabic. Others are from the region. Others are Westerners, but their parents were Arabic and they learned this growing up. We can't, in Asia, we have a different language profile required, but basically we won't hire analysts. Well, we hire people off the street with language skills and good education and we turn them into analysts. But we find the modelers quite well. Takes us about a year. Same with the investigators. It takes about a year before an analyst or a new investigator is really getting into all things and working well, particularly on their own. Within the team, if that makes sense. But basically it's all mentoring. All mentoring. You know what I mean? Yep. Thanks. The next question is from an anonymous attendee. I think I'll let you read it for yourself and decide whether you want to address it. Yeah, I mean, CJ doesn't investigate any of the groups operating in northern Syria rather than Syrian regime and what's left of that. But look, it's a very complex armed conflict and I haven't yet to see an armed conflict where even the most young men with weapons and even the most professional, well-disciplined forces, men will commit crimes. And the question is how their commanders and their countries that respond to the perpetration of those offenses. I can't speak to the criminality such as it may be of the Turkish or proxy groups. I know there's a broadly where I can spend a way of pointing that there's public criticism of their operations, not just in Syria, some of them like in Libya, but in principle and indeed in practice, any armed group, whether it's a proxy, a non-state actor, a state actor, the law is very clear. They need to conform to the law of armed conflict and they're actually going to take it off. So if there's crimes, they can be investigated and punished or prosecuted. As a practical matter, I think with the Turkish proxies, maybe quite difficult because presumably we have to fall against the practical matter of the Turkish government to deal with that. But like in person, well, there's no stop. Got a question from G. Leslie. A few different questions bound up in there, but I think the most of it is focused on, your risk management, particularly in the field. And I guess this is a question that will, the answer will interest academic researchers who have to deal with quite severe sort of ethical constraints on where and under what conditions they're allowed to do research. You've alluded to some of this already in terms of being a private organization and you're operating in a high risk environment in a way that maybe is not possible for somebody working for a public organization or other types of organizations. But G. Leslie's question here is, what are the red lines over organizations you'll work with? You've alluded to that. Safety of working with them, ethical considerations, that the whole sort of gamut. Yeah, I mean, the only place we've had people watch that are hurt, knock on wood, crappy idea of fate with death is Syria. We've been very fortunate elsewhere. I like to think across the board, we've been fortunate because we take security experience seriously. There's a lot of security protocols in place and there's general protocols and then there's security arrangements built around particular missions that the classic example would be extraction of material across or around the confrontation lines. This obviously has to be case by case. And ultimately, I've alluded to this in already when I spoke about, say, are not taking Syrian police records. Ultimately, you're looking at the risk-reward ratio and balancing that against, ultimately, as the person in charge, my responsibility as the head of security for first and foremost, the security and safety of our person. So the final point I'll make there is we learned, I need to go back to the question about lessons learned. Lessons learned are lessons I learned the hard way at the beginning and I should have known better because I spent two and a half years with RAP, Jane, in a certain city before we started in Syria, is do not leave it to the local staff to do what's best from a security point of view. There's considerable cultural differences if you take Syria as an example between my approach to security planning, out of my colleagues who've seen your novel, operations are all western-ish with military and security backgrounds. There's a big difference between our approach and the approach of Syria. And the Syrians are the ones at risk, physical risk, of course. Syrian youth, as we again discovered, the hard way is more, we have to go to A to B and the security planning seem to be limited to do we need a two-door vehicle or a four-door vehicle and let's go and hope for the best and God will keep an eye on us if we're good men and this kind of stuff. So that didn't work and so there's a lot more, from that point in 2012, a lot more control and that sort of thing from that course. That was a lesson learned. I know I got killed when one of the fellows was shot on the first document extraction mission. He wasn't too bad at it, but he did get shot. So I think that's basically that's it. Risk reward against ethical responsibilities. Question Mifalda about linking perpetrator to crime, attributing responsibility. I think you walked us through some of that in terms of different kinds of witnesses and what each kind of testimony can provide and see your opinion context, particularly in the wrestling case that we saw on the headlines today. But do you wanna say a word or two on that? Thank you, Mifalda. I would just add that certainly where our operations vis-a-vis Daesh and other Islamic State and the Syrian regime are concerned, there's very few perpetrators or suspected perpetrators who held any rank who will not show up in our system. And what I mean is we wouldn't have any primary evidence documentation or take the electronic form that didn't have their name, we just have that much stuff. So now as you get further down the chain of command, particularly where Daesh is concerned and they're used to the Akunya, the Nongbegeh, it does become more complicated, but for serious targets, ranking targets, mid-ranking, if we don't have some primary evidence, it doesn't take us any time to generate some information. Got a question from Victor. Hang on, it just jumped up. So in the case, I think there's an assumption that when law enforcement and prosecutors working in institutional silos, is that creating gaps or things falling through the cracks and missing, are they not getting the attention they deserve because of those kind of, I guess, institutional silos? I think that's the nature of the question. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know what you do for a living, Victor. That's, as we say at home, that's very much an inside baseball question. The answer is yes and no. Where war crimes are concerned, the national war crimes units and international bodies are in the main nowadays for the last few years quite well joined up through some informal structures. So there's the normal mutual legal assistance structures between states and international institutions, UN bodies and so forth, but there's some quite good informal structures, particularly something called genocide network, which is part of your public. And it brings together, it's a secretariat that breaks together twice a year for formal meetings. All the national war crimes units in European Union member states, usually prosecutors, plus Norway, Switzerland, now UK, Canada, United States and all of ex-official members. So that forum is informal, but it works extremely well as an informal information exchange mechanism. The bigger problem is on the law enforcement side is where when you get into more than terrorism space, generally war crimes and terrorism offenses are investigated by different elements, even within the same states. It's almost invariably the case. That is slowly starting to improve over the last couple of years. That improvement is gathering momentum. So that helps within a given state, but then interstate cooperation on terrorism issues, if it's from a public security perspective, it works pretty well. But when it's from a law enforcement, that is case building perspective, it is quite styled now because there isn't a central clearinghouse, if you will, to coordinate the investigation of terrorism offenses as a law enforcement problem. Unit Tad, the UN body set up, so we're not just concerned, you have unit Tad, the UN body set up in a rack to act as a clearinghouse, complementary to some other clearinghouses set up by the coalition, for example, in an interpoll for information and prevention evidence concerning the DASH criminal penalty. It hasn't, at least as yet, reached its potential. It's been up and running for, I think about two and a half years now. Now it's a UN body, so two and a half years and I'm sorry, critical by UN standards relatively recent, but I think surely unit Tad will develop in the way it's envisioned, but you do point to an issue that needs to be passed and is being so much smaller, I think, than many of us would like. Sort of, there's a question that follows nicely from that, I think on from Brad Robinson, how has CEDA managed donors' expectations and limitations when you're partnered, when you're, we're talking about the kind of relationships that you have to have or that you need to have on the ground, dealing with armed groups in pursuance to your work? Yeah, just with, I know it's a cliche, with transparency, when CEDA had very little money, initially, we had for the first couple of years that we saved the first year and a half, we only had a bit of UK money that enabled us to develop our collection capability in Syria, the initial collection capability. And then when we had no analytical, we had no administrative component, my company was, some of us were working pro bono and my company was putting a bit of money in and that kind of thing to keep everything together. But it was bad, but real heroes there were the UK, FCO, or FCD, now, that, you know, keeping us going. But when I was running around for, really took quite a long time, trying to raise money from donor states or potential donor states in the EU to build what became CEDA, suitably not criminal investigative body. After the first question would be, you know, isn't the UN doing this already? Because they didn't understand the difficulties between criminal investigations and human rights inquiries because typically the people with the money, of course, have no work in our field, have not studied law and so forth. There's the odd exception, but they're very rare. So the second question would be, how are you gonna get the evidence? And so before we had any money, I started to explain that we would need to build partnerships in the field. And so that's always been an understood part of the CQMOTUS offer and I and the donors coming in need to understand the potential reputational risk to them are operating in that way. So it's, and they always have done it, actually. We've never had a problem with losing money or at least this present to us not getting money because of these sorts of partnerships and our investigative mode of software and I more generally, I've always used the metaphor that in meetings, particularly fundraising meetings, that criminal investigations, domestic and international both, it's the same in the public sector as it is with Seja that it's like sausage making. You know, you might love sausage, but there's a lot of people who don't wanna know what, how it's made and what goes into it. I think there's just skipping forward one question. You've been talking about finances and there's another question from Juliette, one down. I don't know if you wanna take a look at that and address that as part of that discussion about the challenges, I guess, in terms of fundraising and managing things and sausage making. Yeah, we were accused by an EU body of, actually not, well, it was financial while we were doing a fraud and that allegation was false. It revolved around a letter of support that was provided to us, actually to the apartment group, not Seja per se, to secure an EU grant. So the FCO said the, gave us the letter, we gave it to the EU and then some years later, the other party, the EU came and said that that letter had been forged and so ultimately we simply had the FCO tell that, avoid profanity here, telling that EU body that, no, we wrote the letter and that was basically the end of it. Okay, let's move on. Just a couple of questions left. I think there's one at the bottom from Victor, which is a repeat of a previous question. A couple of look like notes of thanks and 40 insights, two, three substantive questions left. From Louie, what's the extent of Seja's cooperation with neighbors of Iraq and Syria in terms of moving evidence out of the countries, out of these countries? So an operational kind of question, how Seja works in the field? Yeah, you have to take a fifth on that one, Mike. I do apologize to the question of the last one. Yeah, no, some things are can't really be discussed. A pretty straightforward question from Noura. What kind of timeframe did the documents Seja documents cover? What's the sort of timeframe? Is there anything from pre-2000? Too large a question. Yeah, if we're talking about a dash, the documents date from the creation of dash. So late 2013 beginning of 2014 to, I wouldn't say the present day, but quite close to it, still bringing stuff in. The Syrian regime, there's a majority of the materials date from 2011 and started the conflict. So later 2015, basically the point at which the regime counterintended and commenced with Russian air support. There is pre-2011 materials, regime materials, not immense amounts as far as I know, but it does, well, it's a fair bit, but we tend not to work with that because our on-tempo focus is on events since 2011. I'm losing your audio a little bit, Bill. I'm losing my voice, that's the phone, so I'll put a bit of water, you know. Okay, we've got a question, another question from Mafalda. I'll just read the question out in terms of evidence, if Seja finds proof that a certain act was carried out under the effective control of a state that can be attributable to that state, does Seja deliver the evidence more closely with the, you've written ICJ, I think you mean ICC, Mafalda, but that's the question in that matter. Do you wanna, I think this has been touched on sort of in different ways, but do you wanna answer? This short answer is yes, we work with 12, 13 states, law enforcement bodies, married law enforcement prostitutes for our bodies in 13 western states plus Australia, and down at the bottom of the world there. And international bodies such as the ICC and the like, with the criminal investigative mandate. We've received over the last four years about 500 and just about 600 requests, formal request for assistance from our partners involving about 2,000 suspects, Gash and the Syrian regime. And these are suspects that are known to be present in western states and our partner states. Some of the requests concerned quite involved analytical support, for example, in support of the Lens Trial. And so yeah, there's just a constant back and forth with our operational partners as we call them. Their needs presented to us and we respond to those needs. And we also have a tracking team, tracking a higher level suspects. In the last based on information we received from our personnel in the field, there's quite a bit of add-ons to the call function. That's it for our questions, which is good because I think you're running out of voice and it's getting a little bit later. So thanks, I guess I wanna close with one question for you. And it's about that ecosystem question I alluded to I think when we were before we met this evening. There are different sorts of organizations that have emerged over the last few years. 10 years ago, everybody at WikiLeaks was the name on the tips of everyone's tongues. But since then, others have come out and become quite prominent, Bellingcat is quite prominent now for kinds of research it does and the way it does its work. Forensic architecture is another one that does some interesting work. And I guess it's, my question is, can you comment on that ecosystem? What do you think of that ecosystem now? Especially knowing what you know now and what that ecosystem looks like now. If you had to do this over again, starting right at the beginning of CJ, would you do anything differently? We're running out of voice as well. I'm not sure I would do CJ again. It's been the best job that I've ever had, but at times it's been taxing the fundraising component even though we've always had enough money with the generosity of our donors, but it is a scramble at times. The, let's call it the operational ecosystem. You can't imagine the change over the last five years. The five, well, I guess CJ started in 2011, but we only received the financial funding from mid-2013 and then we're going that way. So that's quite recent. CJ I suppose was the first big boy on the starting blocks and still are, I guess, a big kid, but there's Bellingcat, there's the Berkeley Human Rights Law Center, there's FADH, F-I-D-H, or French NGO, which is personally human rights, but they always muck in, even in my day at the ICC in helping with the establishment of crime-based using their resources on the ground and conflicts on, particularly with the ICC, as I said. And so from a building an institution like CJ that is sort of suit-to-nuts collection to case building, that's really tough. It's the moon and the stars were a certain alignment for me personally, professionally. We had to write conflict in a certain way. There was a lot of luck, but there's room for more seed, there's a more application of the suit-to-nuts seed in the model, and this is certainly something that we're trying to encourage as an institution because CJ is frankly big enough already. We don't want to be bigger, just take on more and more and more conflicts. It's not, it wouldn't be ideal, it's better to spread it around in responsibility. And then you have the knee-shell fits, such as Bellingham, Berkeley Human Rights Law Center, which are extremely skilled in different ways in exploiting open sources, exploiting the internet. And a huge friend of both those and there's some smaller ones as well. And again, they're very focused and have educated themselves by engaging proactively with the public sector in how to do their jobs such that their collection will feed criminal investigative investigations and ultimately successful prosecution. So there's been an increasingly as a cultural change on the non-profit or the private sector in civil society or NGO side, whatever you want to call it. You always had some niches like International Commission for Missing Persons, which has been going since the mid 90s, since 96. It did the vast majority of exhumations after the Bosnian War. And so again, very niche, hybrid technical call, but exhumations for transitional justice purposes but in a way to feed the criminal investigative and prosecutorial process, particularly at the ICTY and the state court, hybrid court in Sierra Abel. But it's growing and growing and growing. And I think one of the reasons it's growing, I suspect at least is people see CGN the intention that CGN is reported and think that, hey, this appears to be something worth doing. And, you know, human rights space, you know, generally speaking internationally, you could say, you know, it's pretty well covered by some of the big boys and some of the mid-sized groups and some of the niche smaller groups focusing on the business of human rights and this sort of thing. But so, hey, let's try this criminal law stuff. And the flip side of that is first of all, domestic police and secondary prosecutors move incredibly quick, despite the preconception that policing is very conservative and law is a very conservative profession, they have been very quick when they're looking at international crimes to embrace private sector support and to nurture that to the extent, not through training, but through sub-informal mentoring and back and forth in terms of rules of procedure and evidence and so forth. What's been slower to embrace that, but it's starting to improve, it's started to improve markedly over the last couple of years are the international bodies. But again, there's been a sea change in this respect that the ICC in the last two, three years and there wasn't resistance there on the velocity, it just thinking in a sort of a self-contained way. So the idea of SEJA that informed the idea is to have overall more justice, faster at a much reduced cost, almost an economic argument. And the key to that, because of the flexibility of the private sector operators, if they're working to a criminal evidentiary standard, is the key is you get more justice, faster at a fraction of the cost. So it's not, and that's where the ecosystem which is to sum up is developing very quickly. And this is the biggest development in our field of law, international criminal law, since in my opinion, since the first two ad hoc tribunals were set up in the mid 90s. That's good, thank you. That's a good point to end on. I think the point I'll close on is that SEJA is part of a longer historical trend, tradition, call it what you will, of documenting conflict before, during, and after by all sorts of different parties. I mean, war zones are competitive research environments, all different kinds of entities are running around trying to find out things. And trying to find out how these things work, what kinds of things they have in common, what we can learn from all of that, that's what the conflict records unit is about. For anybody who's interested in some of the depth of history that's associated with this, we've got a pretty detailed bibliography on the unit's website. Might be a bit late to drop in the link for that, but it's in the initial registration page anyways, the links are all there. So do go to the conflict records unit page at the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History Award, King's College. And to find out more and drop us a line as well. Bill, thank you. This was excellent. Probably longer than we expected. I ran out of water a little while ago. So I've been sipping on the drinks of my coffee, but I think it's about time to give voices a rest. Joe, do you wanna finish off? Really, thank you both for superb and compelling talk, and we had a great audience and fantastic questions. So thank you all, and good evening. And look forward to the next in the series of the talks. Indeed. Bill, thank you. Just us now?