How to bring something to us, what we do with it, and what we will and will not publish. If you are inside the Central Highlands, read Reporting safely before you do anything on this page.
Before you start
- You have decided the report is worth the risk of sending it
- You have the six things in How to document an incident: who, when, where, what, who else, what followed
- You know whether the people named have consented to being named
- You have decided what you want from us — publication, quiet record, or referral onward
Steps
- Write the account first, before you contact anybody
Get it down while it is fresh and before you start thinking about who to send it to. An account written to persuade is weaker than one written to record.
- Choose how to reach us
Our contact page is the main route. If you are inside the highlands, sending it out with a person who is already travelling is safer than sending it over a network.
- Say what you want done with it
Tell us in the first line: publish, hold without publishing, or pass to a human rights organisation. If you do not say, we will hold it and ask.
- Tell us how — and whether — we may contact you
Including whether it is safe for us to reply at all, and what a reply should not say. If you would rather we never write back, say so and we will not.
- Tell us what you can and cannot stand behind
Mark anything you were told rather than saw. We will not treat it as less valuable; we will treat it as what it is.
- Keep your own copy somewhere safe, if you safely can
If ours is lost or seized, yours is the record. If keeping a copy puts you at risk, do not keep one.
What happens next
We acknowledge receipt if it is safe to. We check what can be checked against what we already hold. We do not publish a name, a village or an identifying detail without the consent of the person it belongs to. Where we cannot verify something we say so on the page rather than leaving it to look established. Where a case is live we may pass it, with your consent, to a human rights organisation or a UN special procedure.
What we will not do
We will not publish an accusation against a named individual without giving you a clear account of the risk that creates for you and for them. We will not pass your details to anyone without asking. We will not pretend to a certainty we do not have in order to make a report land harder. And if we are ever compelled to hand over records, we will say publicly that we have been.