The UN does not deliver justice itself, but it holds a vast trove of evidence it must make accessible.
OPINION. The United Nations holds millions of pieces of evidence on ISIS crimes in Iraq, some of which could help incriminate dual nationals now in Europe—if lawyers and victims were able to access them, writes Alain Werner, director of Civitas Maxima.
The framework built on international law over the past 80 years looks more fragile than ever. The UN Security Council, charged with guaranteeing international peace and security, is failing to deliver on that mandate. Conflicts and violations of humanitarian law are multiplying, while the ambition of ensuring meaningful access to justice for victims of the most serious crimes appears to be steadily eroding, not least with an International Criminal Court whose judges have been targeted by US sanctions. Against this bleak backdrop, police officers, prosecutors and judges continue to work within national court systems to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including those committed abroad. This work is fundamental: it is thanks to these efforts that the prosecution of the gravest crimes remains a tangible reality, at least before some courts, at a time when many states appear instead to be moving towards blanket impunity. Yet this justice cannot function without one essential ingredient: access to evidence.
The UN does not itself deliver criminal justice for international crimes, but it plays a central role in gathering, preserving and organizing evidence relating to the most serious offences. Victim testimonies, document collections, exhumations, digital data: UN mechanisms have, over the decades, built up archives of considerable scale and importance on international crimes.
The evidence does exist—piled up in vaults and on computers
And yet meaningful access to those archives remains, in practice, almost impossible for those who most often initiate proceedings before national courts — the victims themselves and their lawyers. While restrictions on these archives may be legitimate, particularly on grounds of data protection and source security, it is entirely feasible to establish a proper framework that regulates access and makes searching those records workable. The UN has not done so, and this significantly obstructs access to justice for victims, even though the evidence exists, stacked in vaults or sitting on servers.
The most recent illustration of this problem concerns the archives of the UN investigative mechanism for crimes committed by ISIS in Iraq, commonly known as UNITAD. Established in 2017 by the UN Security Council at Iraq’s request, the mechanism was mandated to investigate international crimes committed by the Islamic State. Its work included gathering and analyzing evidence, taking victim testimony, exhuming mass graves, and building case files.
In September 2023, however, Iraq requested that UNITAD’s mandate not be renewed, citing in part disagreements over the conditions for sharing evidence. UNITAD had refused to transfer evidence to Iraqi courts where it could be used in proceedings that might result in the death penalty, which remains in force in the country. UNITAD ceased operations in 2024, with the evidence it had collected having made no significant contribution to the prosecution of former ISIS members in Iraq for international crimes.
$150 million spent on evidence that remains largely unusable
A significant number of former ISIS members, including some with dual nationality, are now outside the region, many of them in Europe. It is highly likely that important information concerning them is held within UNITAD’s archives. The question of access to those 52 terabytes of data, a substantial volume, has therefore rapidly become central.
In his January 2024 report, the UN Secretary-General noted that making these archives operational, or “active”, would require the allocation of specific resources, while maintaining justified access restrictions in certain cases.
That has not happened. The archives currently sit in New York with no functioning access tool that would allow meaningful searches to be carried out — as those who have sought access to the data well know. This situation has been condemned by Iraqi victims.
In total, nearly 150 million dollars were spent over six years by UNITAD to compile millions of pieces of evidence which, at this stage, remain largely inaccessible — particularly to victims and their lawyers, who could bring proceedings against former ISIS members in Europe if effective and properly regulated access to this wealth of evidence were made possible.
The problem of access to UN archives is, however, almost as old as the organisation itself.
Victims’ frustration
The UN War Crimes Commission, established in London in October 1943 to support Allied prosecutions of Axis war criminals, played an essential role by contributing to the review of more than 8,000 case files between 1944 and 1948. In 1948, some 450,000 pages of records were transferred to the UN. Access to them remained extremely restricted for 65 years: the few researchers permitted to consult them were required to obtain the approval both of their own government and of the Secretary-General, and were not permitted to take notes or copies.
Broader and earlier access to these archives would likely have enabled better information-sharing and a faster understanding of the escape routes and networks protecting Nazi war criminals. It would have contributed to improved international coordination in tracking fugitives such as Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979 having never been arrested or brought to trial. The same problem recurs across many other contexts. From El Salvador to Burundi, from Guatemala to Kosovo, severely restricted access to UN archives has consistently hampered the effective use of available evidence. The frustration felt today by Iraqi victims is simply the latest consequence of a situation that keeps repeating itself — despite the fact that workable solutions exist and could finally give many victims the access to justice they deserve.
The article first appeared in French in Le Temps on the 20th of April 2026
Image: Stefan Vukotic / UN Photo, League of Nations archives in the UNOG Archives Reading Room, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
