Condolence draft written before the deaths occur

"We laid our own statements from 2024 next to our statements from 2014," said Henrik Vossberg, who runs the drafting unit in Geneva. "They matched to within a handful of words. At that point you are not writing. You are copying something out and pretending you have thought about it."

How the form works

Field four records the date an investigation was announced. Field five records the date it concluded. Field five is marked optional.

Field six is a drop-down for the time between the killing and the admission. The choices are weeks, months, years, and a change of government.¹

Field seven governs the adjective. Ministers may call for a full investigation, a thorough one, a transparent one or a credible one. They may choose only one.

"Adjective inflation was destroying us," Vossberg said. "Once you have demanded a full, thorough, transparent and independent inquiry, there is nothing left to demand the next time. And there is always a next time."

Field nine asks for nothing at all. It is deliberately blank so that ministers feel they have contributed.

"The words were already identical. All we have done is stop paying nine separate people to type them."

The archive

The drafting team spent a year reading old statements. They started in the 1990s and kept going backwards, waiting for the language to change. It never did.

1919. 1972. 1995. The letterhead moved. Nothing else did.

Bloody Sunday happened in 1972. The inquiry reported in 2010. The Secretariat's timetable calculator is built on that arithmetic and does not apologise for it.

Fed a set of nine sample cases, the calculator declined to name a completion date for any of them. Vossberg called the result "the most accurate output we have achieved."

Not everyone is pleased

Priya Raman-Holst, a lawyer who has spent a decade chasing findings that never arrive, says the form is an admission dressed as a filing system.

"They have automated the part they were always going to do and left blank the part they were never going to do," she said. "You can see the whole policy on one sheet of A4 now. That is genuinely new."

A retired ministry press officer, who drafted such paragraphs by hand for nineteen years, was more sentimental about it. He said the craft was in the pauses.

"You learned to hold the word 'unacceptable' back until the third sentence," he said. "A machine cannot do that. A machine says it straight away and everyone notices it means nothing."

What comes next

The Secretariat has begun a second project. It is pre-writing statements for events that have not happened yet.

Nine placeholder incidents are already drafted and filed. Each has a name field left open and a printed note reminding staff to check the spelling before release.²

"We are not predicting anything," Vossberg said. "We are simply not going to be caught unprepared again. Being caught unprepared is the only thing that has ever embarrassed us."

He was asked whether a form that can be filled in before the killing might suggest the killing is expected. He said that was a question for governments, not for a drafting unit.

One field resists automation. The name has to be typed in fresh each time, by a person, who has to look it up first.

Footnotes.

1. A fifth option, "a documentary", was proposed and rejected as undiplomatic. ↩
2. Double-sided printing remains the only saving the project has confirmed. ↩