Securing and Preserving the TRRC Audio-Visual Archive for Posterity
Over 300 days of public hearings and thousands of evidentiary exhibits: inside the technical efforts to digitize, encrypt, and preserve historical truth against degradation and loss.
Post-TRRC Unit · Ministry of Justice, The Gambia
The public hearings of the TRRC produced an unprecedented historical record: more than 2,600 hours of broadcast video, thousands of witness statements, forensic autopsy files, and confidential institutional records documenting 22 years of authoritarian governance.
Preserving this archive is not merely a technical challenge; it is a sacred democratic safeguard. If these records degrade or become inaccessible, the historical denialism that enables future atrocities finds fertile ground. Our digital archiving initiative utilizes multi-tier redundancy, secure cloud mirroring, and tamper-evident cryptographic checksums.
Simultaneously, we are collaborating with the National Records Service to establish public access protocols that balance transparency with necessary survivor privacy and witness protection safeguards. Sensitive personal data is carefully redacted before public release.
Future generations of Gambian scholars, jurists, and schoolteachers will rely on these digital repositories to understand the truth of what transpired between July 1994 and January 2017. Maintaining their integrity is our non-negotiable obligation.
