Victims Support Database

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)¹ is an ongoing effort to bring justice to victims of the terrible Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. Part of this process involves maintaining records and datasets are often large in volume, multi-lingual, multi-dimensional, and highly cross-linked.

The United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT)² approached Miranj to create a system to capture, access, and manage these datasets. The system was created for the Victims Support Section (VSS)³, which serves as the central contact point between the ECCC and the victims of the genocide.

We kicked off the project with an exercise to discover and gain in-depth understanding of the various records, dimensions, interrelations and their applications. We followed it up with an information architecture exercise that brought together all datasets into a single system that met very specific goals:

• Support for a wide data spectrum 
  • Normalised content models that avoid redundancies and keep data entry simple
  • Multi-directional relationships
  • Bilingual datasets
  • Assets and attachments
  • Handling of data imperfections, missing information, and extreme edge cases
• Speed and ease of access 
  • Ability to consume large tabular datasets enabling discovery of patterns
  • Ability to quickly go from a zoomed-out overview of the data set to a zoomed-in focus on a single record or data point
  • Ability to easily move across related records from different datasets
  • Ability for side-by-side consumption of records in two languages
  • Ability to selectively export in standard formats

We were able to confidently lean on Craft CMS for its robust content management and intuitive data entry workflows. For the frontend dashboard, we opted for using some well-established patterns from Tailwind UI and building on top of that.

After the system was built and deployed, cleaning up and entering of the entire dataset got underway. Once the data entry was complete, the benefits experienced were far and wide.

The database is fully populated now and being used quite actively. Its deployment is nothing short of a revolution, so thank you again.

This note from the UNAKRT Programme Management Officer was a testament to the gains we were able to deliver. We hope that the application will help the ECCC roll out its residual functions with greater efficiency, and more importantly, result in faster access to justice for the victims.