Human Rights Organizations and Their Response to Collateral Murder

Within days of the release, most of the organisations you would expect had said something. Fifteen years later it is possible to look at what they asked for and see, quite precisely, how much of it happened.

What they asked for

The demands were consistent across press-freedom and human rights bodies, and they were modest.

• An independent investigation into the deaths, not another internal review.
• Release of the full records: the recording, the radio logs, the investigation file.
• An explanation of the attack on the van specifically.
• Accountability for the deaths of the two Reuters staff.

None of the four happened. The 2007 inquiry remained the only examination, and the position of the US government was that the matter had been looked at and closed.

Press-freedom bodies

Organisations that track journalist deaths treated this as a documented instance of something they had been reporting for years: reporters killed by military forces with no consequence. Iraq was the deadliest war for journalists they had counted.

Their argument was not that the crew were murderers. It was narrower and harder to dismiss: when a journalist is killed by a state's armed forces, an investigation by those same forces is not an investigation, and the family and the employer are entitled to the evidence.

Where the legal analysis concentrated

The rules on protecting the wounded and those who help them are among the least ambiguous in the law of armed conflict. That is why the van is where the criticism was sharpest and why no satisfactory public answer to it has ever been given.

The response splits in two

From about 2011 the attention of these organisations divided, and the division tells you something.

This was not a failure of principle. It was a rational response to where pressure could actually be applied. A prisoner's conditions can be campaigned on. A closed military inquiry from 2007, with no body able to reopen it, offers nothing to push against.

What the split cost

The original subject quietly lost its constituency. By the middle of the 2010s, organisations that had once demanded an investigation into a specific airstrike were principally concerned with the treatment of two men in Western legal systems.

Both things mattered. But the families in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah ended up with no one campaigning for them at all, which is a familiar outcome and worth naming rather than glossing over.

Why statements were the only tool available

There is a fair criticism that these organisations issued statements and little else. The honest answer is that statements were close to the only instrument they had.

None of them has subpoena power, none can compel a government to release a recording, and none can open a criminal case. Their standard methods are documentation, litigation and public pressure. Documentation they did. Litigation requires a forum, and no forum with jurisdiction and access existed. Public pressure requires a decision-maker who can be moved, and the decision had already been made and closed in 2007.

Compare what happened when the same organisations turned to the treatment of a prisoner. There the tools worked: a UN body could make a finding, conditions could be documented, and a president could act. The difference is not that they cared more about one thing than the other. It is that one had a lever and the other had none.

What the human rights response did achieve

Documentation, mainly, and it is not nothing. The public record now contains detailed contemporaneous legal analysis of what happened that morning, produced by organisations with no stake in the outcome, and available to anyone.

That is why an archive like this can set out the arguments properly rather than repeating a press release. It also means that when someone eventually asks why no inquiry was held, the answer is not that nobody noticed or nobody asked. People noticed, people asked, and the request simply had nowhere to go. That absence of a route is the whole story.