What we do

The Natalia Estemirova Documentation Center (NEDC) was established in 2010 by a group of Russian and international human rights organisations. Based with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, it is a database with over a million materials and documents documenting grave human rights violations in the North Caucasus. The aim is to document the crimes, contribute to achieving accountability, and strengthen the capacity of human rights organisations documenting such crimes.

Over the span of the years since its creation in 2010, the NEDC has become the world’s largest digital archive of human rights documentation with more than one million materials and documents about armed conflicts and international crimes in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.

The NEDC is one of the major projects of NHC's Documentation and Accountability Hub (DAH). The database was developed by the Case Matrix Network (CMN) of the Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP).

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Supplementary reports

Behind the statistics are personaly
tragedies and patterns of repression.

Disappeared people

5,131 disappeared persons are registered in the Natalia Estemirova Documentation Center Database (hereinafter the ...

Sweeping operations and their consequences on the civilian population

Targeted operations were considered as local troop and police operations carried out against a particular person or a ...

The deceased and their status in the military conflict

According to the Natalia Estemirova Documentation Center Database (hereinafter the Database), the total ...

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Search our Database

Who were the victims, and what happened to them? A search in the database provides important details.

NEDC Methodology

Visit our website for more activities of the NHC's Documentation and Accountability Hub - such as documentation of war crimes in Ukraine and personal stories from the material of the database.

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Advisory Council of the Documentation Center

Natalia Estemirova Documentation Center

We could not prevent the crimes

but we CAN and MUST preservethe memory of the victims.