Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told KOSOVO / KOSOVA As Seen, As Told The human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission Contents Previous Next INTRODUCTION Methodology, scope, timeframe, reporting style, terminology Methodology In developing this report, the analytical methodology and reporting strategy applied by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) was driven by the data collection of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (OSCE-KVM). The methodology of the OSCE-KVM Human Rights Division, and the framework of international human rights and humanitarian law standards that it followed, are explained in more detail in Chapter 2 (legal standards applicable to this report also appear in the Annex). The data collection by the OSCEKVM Human Rights Division took place in two phases and in two quite different environments. From the time when it became operational during December 1998 and January 1999, to its evacuation from Kosovo on 20 March 1999, it was engaged in systematic reporting, in a variety of formats, about human rights and humanitarian law violations that it could verify directly in-country. After 20 March, the Human Rights Division was engaged in taking victim and witness statements from refugees. All of this data has been scrutinized by the OSCE/ODIHR. Extensive references by citation are made throughout this report to OSCE-KVM documents and refugee interview forms. As the OSCE-KVM Human Rights Division operated with strict security and confidentiality safeguards (see Chapter 2, and also below), these materials are not available to the public, but have been made available to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Even without access to the source materials, the citations throughout this report should serve as evidence to the reader that the conclusions of this report are the result of extensive documentation; they may also be useful to the ICTY. OSCE-KVM documents from before 20 March are referred to by their type (incident report, trial monitoring report, etc) and reference number. Information derived from refugee interviews is indicated by the four-digit footnotes with alphabetical prefix, which is the file number of the refugee's confidential interview record, made in either Albania (prefix A/) or the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (prefix M/). The information here deriving from refugee statements is presented as it was recounted to the OSCEhttp://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/p0intro.htm (1 of 4)12/5/2003 11:48:28 AM