There are many data sets whose open sourcing would create social value, but occasionally you come across one that just has to be opened up for people to re-use, re-mix and analyse, because it could otherwise never be re-created from other sources. The archive of the war crimes court (ICTY) for the former Yugoslavia is one such case.

The ICTY was perhaps more of an achievement than many people realise, despite its many failures. During the early 1990's, some passionate advocates of international justice put a great deal of energy into arguing for the importance of "establishing the facts" as a way of discouraging future episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Tribunal was partly a result of their efforts, and, whilst the ICTY did not cover every incident in the former-Yugoslav wars, it tackled some of the most egregious violations in great deal.

Like Dan McQuillan, formerly of Amnesty, I realise that information is not sufficient to halt ongoing human rights violations - what counts is action - but open information and data about what actually happened is the best hope we have for learning from these events, and it is also of great therapeutic value to the victims.

In some ways, the data itself is more important than the judgements based on it. There was an interesting moment in Michael Christoffersen's recent film Milošević on Trial, which provided an insight into the challenges of the Tribunal's case against the former Serbian leader. Mr. Nice (yes, really!), the British prosecutor who is the main subject of the film, reflected on the premature end of the case by remaking that in many ways the testimony is more important than the judgement, because it forms an historical record that cannot be denied, whereas a judgement can be argued, rejected or ignored over time.

So, when the late Twentieth Century's most detailed data set about ethnic cleansing and genocide becomes available in electronic form, I think we have a duty to make sure it remains accessible to future generations.

As Edina Bečirović and Robert Donia write in IWPR's Tribunal Watch, there is currently a typically territorial Balkan debate about where the tribunal archive is eventually sited, but the real issue is not location but open access:

The archive of the ICTY is a vast and invaluable collection, and its holdings will be indispensible for anyone researching or investigating events of the 1990s, in any former Yugoslav republic.

But most importantly, it is a digitised archive. Over the past 15 years, ICTY employees have scanned virtually every document and made many of them searchable, so that anyone with appropriate access to the tribunal's computers can find references to a person, place, word, or topic among the millions of documents gathered by tribunal investigators.

But most documents, though readily findable and easily called up by identifying number, are not currently accessible to the public. Large portions of the collection have been acquired by tribunal investigators under conditions that eliminate or restrict their access. The many benefits of the ICTY thoroughly modern system of searching documents are largely nullified by complex, wide-ranging restrictions on their use.

Think of the amazing educational, research, data mining and other applications that would emerge from the open sourcing of this data set! Think what we could learn in terms of human rights protection from the detail of the millions of pages of testimony in the archive. The Tribunal was interested primarily in blame and proof, but there is also a vast untapped wealth of context, language, stories and other knowledge in the archive that can teach us a lot about how human rights violations take place and, potentially, how to protect against them.

I know a lot of people who have been involved in the process, and I am fairly sure that most, if not all of them, would be personally very supportive of the need for this data set to be opened up as an electronic archive. The UN and its lawyers just need a little nudge ... well maybe a big nudge. I think there is no justification at all for letting short-term deals used to obtain evidence or documentation deny us such a vital historical record. And if the lawyers can't fix it, then hopefully somebody with access to the information will choose to do the right thing.

Anyone have any ideas how we can achieve this?