The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) has translated EPAF’s Forensic Games Training Course into Nepali and will use it to kick off a series of training workshops across Nepal, beginning on December 11th in the western city of Nepalgunj. The workshops will be lead by Nepalese human rights defenders, prosecutors and police investigators that EPAF trained to teach the course during a trip to Kathmandu in June of this year.
For the past 2 years, EPAF has collaborated with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) in Nepal to train justice officials and representatives of civil society to investigate cases of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions from the country’s recently concluded internal armed conflict. EPAF created the Forensic Games as an introductory training course into forensic investigations so that its partners in Nepal could share their training with their peers in the human rights movement, the Office of the Attorney General and the National Police.
“It is very positive to see that the participants of EPAF’s training courses in Nepal are using the Forensic Games to share their knowledge about forensic investigations with others,” expressed Gisela Ortiz, EPAF’s Director of Operations. She added that she hoped the Forensic Games would become an important tool for human rights defenders in Nepal, given that the type of information it contains “is of great importance for those searching for the truth and seeking justice in countries where armed conflicts have occurred.”
By making the Forensic Games available in Nepali, EPAF and ABA ROLI have contributed to the sustainability of forensic trainings in Nepal since key stakeholders will now be able to share and receive training in their native language. EPAF and ABA ROLI are also currently training police and military police officers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to use the Forensic Games to increase local capacity to investigate mass gravesites in the country’s war-torn North Kivu province.
Both the forensic training projects in Nepal and DR Congo were made possible by the generous support of the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
