Overview: incidents

What are incidents?

Incidents are publicly-documented allegations of acts committed by state-controlled security forces that may violate human rights laws and standards, international criminal law and other sets of relevant norms.

Incidents may include extrajudicial killings, rape, torture and other forms of violence. Security Force Monitor does not make these allegations itself, but compiles allegations made by governmental bodies, human rights organizations and other civil society actors around the world.

The Security Force Monitor focuses its research on the structure, personnel and operations of security forces; we do not directly investigate specific allegations of human rights abuse in the way that Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch do. As such we consider all reports of human rights abuses as “alleged” in our documentation.

This simply means these are claims that other organizations have made and which we are repeating without further verification. The Security Force Monitor does not make allegations against security forces and the data that we publish does not attempt to demonstrate involvement of individuals or units in human rights abuses beyond that which other organizations have alleged.

For each incident, we include data about what happened and when, the location(s) it occurred at, the alleged perpetrators and the type of human rights violation the reporting organization claims has occurred.

Each incident is stored in a claim, so we may have numerous claims about the same incident. In these cases, we do not merge information about incidents from different sources.

Data about incidents is captued in a single claim type:

• Incident: date, location, description, types of alleged human rights violations and alleged perpetrator information.