VALLMO9 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2021, 17:20
... I feel records of this nature should be kept on a "need to know" basis, and names not put online for all to see. ... Even today, academic research involving modern day refugees is always kept confidential. When research aides interview refugees, their names do not appear in the published studies. And rightly so.
That's certainly a legitimate viewpoint about refugee research. The problem is that nothing appears to be consistent and TNA appear to be relying on the good wishes of people in order to effect something instead of taking action itself -
if that action is needed.
Take reference WO 208/3742/13/2 - the catalogue states
Description: Date of birth: 1927.
Interrogation number: 24616 [The person's name and additional information will be added to the catalogue 100 years after the date of birth.]
But the Catalogue also states:
Closure status: Open Document, Open Description
So the way that I read this, anyone could request this item and there is
nothing that I can see requesting the researcher to keep the details confidential. It might be that there is a request inside the file but somehow I doubt that TNA have added such requests to all the files. So the file is
not available on a need-to-know basis - it's openly available.
So this particular name is currently kept confidential index-wise.
If the information should be restricted (if), the index is OK, but then the name etc appear to be freely available in the file itself and there
appear to be no visible restrictions on publication. This is what I mean about relying on good wishes -
if the information should be kept confidential, then TNA aren't putting any controls in place. If this were a safety matter, TNA would be hung out to dry for just relying on someone to "do the right thing" - they would be obligated to set up a process.
Fundamentally, it's contradictory - if the information is to be open, then it should be in the index because it's open in the document. But if the information is to be confidential then there are no processes in place to request that confidentiality that I can see.