The Virtual Tribunals project is an ongoing initiative, working to incorporate additional collections and develop new search features for the Spotlight platform that enrich the discovery environment. Ensuring public access to the records of international criminal proceedings that deal with mass atrocity, whether tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions, is vital both for purposes of accountability, but also for learning from the past and developing policy-oriented research for future international justice undertakings.

The ultimate vision of this project is to compile a comprehensive database of international criminal tribunal records, from the post-WWII cases through the contemporary tribunals, fully digitized, and rendered searchable through a single online portal. Ideally, the collections will also encompass select records from truth commissions, human rights investigations, and other efforts to document gross human rights violations in countries that lack the capacity to preserve the records and make them accessible, or where the records would be at risk.

Presently, we are pursuing or actively processing collections of records from: