BACKGROUND: The Data in the Fight against Impunity (DFI) project, which started in 2014 and ended in mid-2017, has become central to the development of the torture rehabilitation sector’s ability to evidence its work in the fight against impunity. It does so through the collection of appropriate, consistent and comparable information that is provided by torture victims to their care providers in the setting of a holistic torture rehabilitation service. Over the course of 3 years, the project partners from around the globe, carefully laid the foundation to evidence claims for the rehabilitation of torture survivors, to prevent torture and hold perpetrators to account.

This project recognizes the unique capacity of torture rehabilitation service providers to support survivors and while doing so to access the vital information that survivors hold. It affirms the complementarity of the provision of a clinical service with the imperative of seeking justice. The DFI database optimizes documentation that can be used in pursuit of human rights outcomes.

The creation of a common clinical record-keeping system for torture rehabilitation service providers to use in their daily practice was a significant challenge considering the wide range of practice environments and resources of those providing torture rehabilitation services and support. But it is a challenge that the project partners took up, and over 3 years they did the painstaking work of defining the content and structure of the system.

The DFI database has been widely acknowledged as a unique and innovative approach to harnessing the information that torture victims can provide to track torture, but also to examine a survivor’s rehabilitation needs and path. Most importantly, by establishing a common and shared basis of information collected by individual service providers at torture rehabilitation centres around the world, the opportunity for increasing our evidence base is secured. As the number of individual records increases, so too does the capacity for local to global advocacy efforts…