Investigative Commons convention in Athens

The Investigative Commons is a network founded in 2020 on the initiative of Forensic Architecture and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). It now brings together sixteen organisations – Index among them – working at the intersection of visual and spatial analysis, investigative journalism, strategic litigation and research. From the United Kingdom to Colombia, from Palestine to Brazil, from Ukraine to Norway, its members document state violence, border violence and environmental harm.

Hosted in Athens by the Onassis Foundation, which supported the event, and co-organised with FAIĀ (Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens), the convention brought together some forty members of the network over three days. The programme included workshops on gender-based violence, environmental violence, investigative tools, the transmission of methods, the production of evidence and its legitimacy, and collaboration with journalists, lawyers, researchers and affected people. The plenary sessions were devoted to drafting a common charter – mission, governance, ethics – meant to structure the network.

For Index, these days were an opportunity to test its methods against those of teams facing similar questions in other contexts: how to establish the facts against the account of institutions, how to have an analysis recognised before a court, how to work alongside the people directly affected. The police violence Index investigates in France finds echoes in Brazil, Greece and Germany. The convention was accompanied by a public evening, “Reporting from the Field”, during which Index presented its work on fatal police shootings in France.