Transcript

0:06 

Børge Hansen: Hello, and welcome to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with me, Børge Hansen, your host and CEO of Davidhorn. 

0:14 

Today’s episode takes it into the world of human rights, justice and the powerful practise of investigative interviewing. 

0:22 

We’re thrilled to have Gisle Kvanvig from the Norwegian Centre of Human Rights with us today. 

0:27 

Together, we’ll talk about the release of the Manual on Investigative Interviewing for Criminal Investigations. How this works supports a very important goal, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #16. 

0:42 

This goal is all about making societies and institutions peaceful, just and strong. 

0:49 

So join us as we learn more about the global work for human rights, the importance of Fair, efficient and transparent policing, and the new standard for investigative interviewing created by the United Nation. 

1:02 

We’re here to connect the dots between research and real-world action, aiming for a future where everyone gets to be heard. So let’s get started 

1:09 

Børge Hansen:  I’m here today with Gisle Kvanvig from the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights. Welcome to our podcast.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you for having me.  

Børge Hansen: So tell me, Geisle, Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, you’re role there. And how did you land in in in that organisation? 

1:32 

Gisle Kvanvig: Well, first of all, it’s a multidisciplinary centre at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. I have been there for almost 14 years now 

Børge Hansen: Quite a while.  

Gisle Kvanvig: It is quite a while. It is. It’s the longest job I’ve ever had. So it must say something about how much I enjoy. I landed there after having worked both for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and also having worked for an NGO. 

1:59 

And then there was an opening and I applied and in the beginning I was the director of Vietnam programme there.  

Børge Hansen: OK, So you started out with the Vietnam programme.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. And that’s also where we gradually developed sort of police portfolio, which is the one that I’m working on now and where my role and responsibility mainly pertains to our multilateral work. So working with organisations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, we’ve had a little bit of contact with the EU, but also regional for us like the Association for Southeast Asian Nations and and others.  

2:36 

Børge Hansen: So why does the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights exist?  

Gisle Kvanvig: It was established a long time ago, I think almost 30 years now. I think we were 30 last year. And it was established as a branch of the Faculty of Law to study human rights, in particular and to establish human rights in Norway as an academic discipline or field in itself and not simply as part of of law studies. 

3:13 

Børge Hansen: Because it’s part of the university in Oslo. And so you say it started out as studying human rights and then working on them in Norway.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. But also internationally. So I mean it was both the study of the international conventions and then you would have some people looking at how it applies to Norwegian law and the Norwegian context and also taking part in developing that law and these policies in Norway. But human rights of course, have that international dimension anyways. 

3:49 

You also had people advising processes on the UN resolutions and also the development and follow up of the different conventions within the UN. So it’s both sort of domestic and international.  

Børge Hansen: And then now I think, we’re in in early April right now, and yesterday you guys were part of releasing the UN manual for investigative interview.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes.  

Børge Hansen: Congratulations.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you very much. Thank you. It was a long process but eventually, we succeeded in having the very first manual on investigative interviewing for criminal investigations at the UN level. 

4:26 

And it’s also a manual that is system-wide meaning that it applies to all the UN organisations because it’s been through all the relevant internal proceedings and fulfils all the requirements of that kind of document.  

Børge Hansen: Tell me why is this manual important and I know you guys spend some time on this. It’s taking many years.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. It took, I think from the very sort of first instance, the first time we heard about the idea or that we were approached by the UN Police Department, which is part of the Department of Peace operations, at the UN in New York that that was in 2017. 

5:10 

I think they approached us and asked if we would be interested in taking part in developing such a manual. And we were interested in that because it emerged as a sort of ambition or idea on our part back in 2015. 

5:32 

There, we had a discussion basically about what if we, rather than travelling around with lots of British and Norwegian sort of standards and teaching documents and courses and lessons and theory, academic books and so forth, we would have something more like a common global standard that we could all measure ourselves up against. So very much like the thinking behind the Sustainable Development Goals as well. And this emerged after we had the first conversation after training that we conducted together with Norwegian police in Vietnam. 

6:08 

We thought that you know that it would be really interesting and I think also constructive if we had something that we would share and have in common. And then the United Nations is a sort of natural repository for those kinds of documents. 

6:25 

It has that legitimacy. It has that authority. It has that recognition despite you know all the debates and whatever strengths and flaws the United Nations system has. It’s the only organisation that sort of has that recognised mandate… 

Børge Hansen: It’s the best we have right now at least.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, it’s the best we have right now. And if it didn’t exist, someone would invent it.  

Børge Hansen: But tell me, so you mentioned the sustainable development goals.  

7:06 

And then one of these is #16, which is, if I paraphrase it, it’s called something like peace, justice and strong institutions. So peace, justice and strong institutions is a part of a sustainable development of societies.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. Yeah.  

Børge Hansen: And then you briefly mention it when you’re talking about the manual. Well, why? So why is this relevant and why interviewing and criminal investigations.  

7:31 

Gisle Kvanvig: First and foremost, the sort of spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals is very much that we all have work to do, and that also refers back to investigative interviewing. Whether you’re looking at interviewing or investigation practises, all countries around the world have a lot of work to do. 

7:53 

And then there’s that sort of principle element to it which fits nicely with the kind of work we do that, you know, you talk about the errors of justice in your own country and then you can discuss the errors of justice in another country and you’re on a more sort of equal footing. And then, you can discuss practice, theory, and how to improve upon practice. And it means that there’s a commonality in this. So there’s a balance in that relationship. On the interviewing side and the investigation side, I mean we’re looking at SDG 16 and particularly Target 3, which is about promoting the rule of law domestically and internationally. 

8:33 

And the rule of law has of course many components. It’s a fairly large and somewhat elusive concept I find. But if you look at principles of equality before the law, for instance, it’s not only about the fact that we are all to be treated equally before the law, that we have the same rights and that we are no longer just the subject of a king. But it’s also a way of thinking where you can adjust the level-playing field, so to speak, because there is a disproportionate out of power on behalf of the state against the individual inside of the criminal justice system. 

9:10 

And this is where human rights sort of link into the rule of law through, for instance, the fair trial principles. Because they are there to ensure that we as individuals have a better chance when we are faced with the full power and authority of the state. Because when you’re only one individual and you’re facing the police and the prosecution and you know the sort of monopoly and violence that the state rightfully owns, it means that we, we need a little bit of backing. We need someone in our corner to help us have all that playing field. And when you look at the fair trial principles, for instance, you will have the presumption of innocence, which is a somewhat difficult concept. 

10:00 

Because if you think about if you’re a police and you arrest someone and then you’re about to interview that person, it means that you have to presume that your suspect is innocent. That is a very difficult thing to do. That’s where investigative interviewing comes into play because it is a very practical way of upholding the presumption of innocence. 

Børge Hansen: Because that’s just human practice, right? We all have biases, and then, you know, on the face of it, we make conclusions, or we can jump to conclusions. We’ve seen that in Norway quite a few times the last 20-30 years.  

10:44 

For quite a while we had the notion that you’re innocent until proven guilty but still police officers and investigators make up their own minds and might you know jump to conclusions, and that’s what you’re talking about how to to instil as a profession to don’t have that bias but rather have actual facts perhaps. 

11:09 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. I mean, it’s basically what I mean, which is what the recently departed Daniel Kahneman was writing about and researching for decades. 

11:22 

It’s this tendency that we all have to seek information that confirms our first perception of the truth. So, he says quite eloquently that if we are to avoid that bias, we need a method because, without a method, we’re incapable of doing it. We’re mainly emotional decision-makers. If we are to be rational, we really need methods.  

Børge Hansen: So Daniel Kahneman wrote a book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”. 

11:51 

If I remember correctly, you have system one and system two. You’re either instinctively reacting to things or making decisions in a more planned or conscious manner.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s the system one is basically emotional. So we act according to our emotions, our beliefs, our persuasions, and prejudices as well. And if we’re to avoid that, and again, if you’re a detective, if you are to avoid your prejudices and biases, you need a systematic method to sort of keep those in check. Otherwise, you will develop tunnel vision, and you will make many wrong decisions.  

12:42 

Børge Hansen: Why the interviewer? In the movies and other places, you can hear it being called interrogation. It’s associated with coercion. And now you describe it as interviews not interrogations. 

 13:00 

Why did you guys in Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, and we’ll come back to the work you do here, but you kind of centre around interviews as a mechanism for supporting the SDG16 and human rights.  

Gisle Kvanvig: It basically goes back to how our prior experiences, both at the centre and in other jobs that I’ve done. When you try to sort of teach human rights to police or the military or intelligence, it has rarely been particularly effective. There’s rarely much engagement. And I think that goes back to how when you start just talking about the conventions and all the rules, mainly what you’re telling them is everything they can’t do. And I think, you know, in pedagogics, you, in general, would tell us that you really have to focus on what to do and not only on what not to do. 

14:05 

But unfortunately, you know, human rights are about many rules. So it’s easy to mainly focus on everything that you can’t do. You cannot sort of get rid of the defence lawyer. You cannot be persuasive. You cannot be manipulative. You cannot lie. I mean there are many of these different standards, but it’s all just don’t do this and don’t do that. And that is just not very constructive for learning. So when we came across these Norwegian police officers who were experts in investigative interviewing and they started explaining that to us, we saw that this was a way of doing fair trial. 

14:43 

Because again, it’s always the question when you’re talking about the rule of law or democracy or human rights, fair trial in this case, how do you do it? How do you do the presumption of innocence? How do you uphold equality before the law principle? How do you secure independence and objectivity? These things are difficult to do unless you have proper guidance. And that requires a method that is also consistent across the system. 

15:19 

They would have a situation where some officers or lawyers would think in this way and pursue evidence in their own way, and others would do it differently. That makes it very difficult to evaluate, which again means that it’s also almost impossible to assess its effectiveness, and then that undermines progress.  

Børge Hansen: So what you’re saying is instead of putting rules, say not to do this, not to do that, you say here’s a practice supporting fair trials. Is that way of putting it?  

16:02 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, yeah, yes it is. Because it’s also the conversation that we had with police officers that again, when you’re talking about human rights, you could compare it to other professions. So if you think about teachers who teach our children to read and write, we cannot have teachers that mainly focus on human rights. 

16:12 

They have to focus on pedagogics. They have to focus on teaching and be really good teachers. But they are fulfilling the right of the child to an education and in a similar respect. You know, the police also need methods that they can trust and that are compliant with human rights so that they can pursue their job professionally without sort of single-mindedly thinking about human rights. Because I think that it’s almost too much of an ask in many ways because once you enter a crime scene with all the violence that may have taken place at this crime scene and you’re about to start an investigation. 

16:48 

It’s very difficult to look up the entire conventional civil and political rights and all the fair trial principles and act accordingly because it doesn’t tell you how to conduct your investigation. You need separate methods for that, and that’s where investigative interviewing comes in, both in terms of the interviewing practice itself and also the thinking that actually governs the interviewing process.  

17:19 

So the investigative side of investigative ensuing where you have the development of hypotheses, what may have happened because that’s the starting question for any investigation is not to jump to conclusions, not even if someone is dead, it’s easy to just jump to the conclusion that this person has been murdered. And that’s called a crime bias. And it’s very well known within the police. 

17:43 

And to avoid that, you know, you have to think as an investigator that my job is to figure out what happened here. And then there are, you know, multiple possible explanations for this death, and you have to eliminate them and then focus on the ones that you can find evidence or backing for.  

Børge Hansen: But you know when you see the movies you see people say it’s obvious what happened here. 

18:07 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the conclusion-jumping machine that’s the brain as we’ve been taught by a Kahneman and others that it’s what we are made to do and that’s why we need systems to keep that in check.  

Børge Hansen: So you’re basically working with a methodology that counters human nature, basically. 

18:29 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, much like in any other discipline, as I mentioned, when you’re a teacher, you will have your pedagogics. If you’re a surgeon, you will have your tools and procedures, and you know, if you read the Checklist Manifesto, I forget the name of the author. But it’s the same point about airline pilots. You cannot just do this naturally and on the whim because that means that it’s less secure and you can’t trust it to the same extent. 

18:59 

We passengers need to know that there is a system and routines in place to ensure the safety of this plane.  

Børge Hansen: So this is fundamentally based on our values. So you work for the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, and you talk about contributing to the release of the UN manual on the investigations. So, it’s clearly a value-driven project. 

19:26 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think it’s important particularly, at this point in time as well, we see that rights, democracy, rule of law are under pressure. I would say that it’s much more severe than that because we see threats to them also within our own society. I mean there are things that we have forgotten to think about properly. If you think about the post-war generation and when the whole UN system came into being and then all these different conventions you had. First, of course, you had the Universal Declaration, and then you had subsequent conventions and covenants on the right side. 

20:11 

And all of these were, of course, developed on the basis of a very troubling time, two world wars. So they were there as a testament to an agreement on common issues, problems, and challenges facing mankind. And I think that we’ve somehow left a lot of that behind, that we’ve forgotten the circumstances that these different treaties were developed within and why they were important to begin with. 

20:41 

I think we’re starting to maybe remember some of it now because things are… 

Børge Hansen: There are a few reminders out in the world right now.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think that in our work, I mean, where I see that it fits in is that whether you’re talking about democracy, the rule of law, or human rights, it requires maintenance. And that means that you have to keep developing it so that it matches the standards, values, and requirements of the public and society. 

21:12 

Børge Hansen: So yeah being value driven. Your organisation stems out of university in Norway. Universities have it based on core beliefs and philosophies, and then when you take these values and I know it’s also supported by UN, but still it’s a good question to ask. So when you’re exporting let’s say Nordic values or Western European values at least out into the world how is that perceived. Because it’s easy to come from a country in the Nordics where it’s fairly peaceful. 

21:52 

We have safety, we’re fairly well off, median income and people are in a happy place compared to many places in the world, and then we go on a crusade and say hey here are our values and do like us. But we’re not perfect either, so how do you see that being perceived around the world? 

22:12 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think it’s a very good point and I think it’s one of the major pitfalls of particularly the sector that I work in. It’s very easy to just walk into that trap of preaching basically. And this is also a major, major change that’s been happening gradually, but it has become very present today is that there is no longer any patience on behalf of any so-called developing country for that at all. So it’s very much about how you do it. The reason why we could start working with investigative interviewing was because it’s research-based and that permits us to, when we meet police services from other countries or intelligence services, share the research and then we can share our reflections on that research. 

23:11 

And I think that one of the things that we discovered very early on and where the Norwegian police were brilliant was that they always started with explaining or basically presenting cases of errors of justice in Norway and said, so we can start the conversation saying that here’s the research, this is what it tells us and here are the mistakes that we made and we made them for these different reasons. Does that sound familiar? 

23:41 

Børge Hansen: And these mistakes are not way, way in the past. It’s just fairly recent. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. And they will, you know, in many ways they will continue to make them probably not in the same way as in the past. But we’re talking about cases from the 90s, probably up to the early 2000s and even more recently we see examples of sort of traditional practises and mistakes being made not, you know, intentionally but it happens because of human nature. 

24:12 

And I think if you want to start that conversation about changing practises and values it will change through change practises, it’s sort of the opposite way of like when I said that we were used to going around the world and presenting human rights here. The conventions, these are the rules apply them and comply with them and and that’s it. 

24:38 

You know, that’s the same sort of thinking that used to govern a lot of our work as well. And you know, this made it possible to start that conversation quite differently. So these were our mistakes. This is how we dealt with them. Does any of this sound familiar? Are you interested in pursuing some sort of cooperation on this? And in the very beginning, that was our big question. We didn’t know if anybody would be interested. We started out working in Vietnam and Indonesia first. 

25:10 

Børge Hansen: Why did you go there first? 

Gisle Kvanvig: Because we had in our centre the Vietnam programme that I was a head of and then a colleague who ran a similar programme in Indonesia. So, the first country we started was Vietnam. And then quite quickly Indonesia followed, and our research question, to begin with, was, really this method was developed in the UK, it was imported to Norway, adapted to our circumstances, and now we’re trying to export them to Southeast Asia, a completely different language, culture, political context and so on. And we didn’t know if they would at all be interested in this. 

Børge Hansen: Were they?  

25:56 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes, very much. And I think we didn’t really know what to expect. I mean normally what happens is that they will say this is interesting, you know, tell us more maybe later. But here the reaction was very different and I think that’s because it is so practical. 

26:12 

And when you talk to detectives and investigators, they recognise the thinking. It’s not rocket science in the sense that on a good day, they will not have mistreated whoever they’re interviewing. And they will have at least a minimum level of respect for their rights. They will probably ask them open questions, and they will have some experience that if you do that, you will gain more and better information. 

26:44 

Because what happens very quickly in the training when we run them, is that there’s a lot of scepticism to begin with. But then probably somewhere in the middle of day 2, it starts dawning on parts of the audience at least usually the most experienced detectives.  

Børge Hansen: Ok, so that’s interesting. Why do you think the experienced detectives, gain an understanding? And what you’re describing is both an understanding and also an acceptance of perhaps what you said the research behind this. 

27:20 

What’s happening in a detective’s mind during these days? 

Gisle Kvanvig: They typically start thinking about cases where they suspect they may have been wrong as wrongful conviction cases. So they’ve recognised when they’ve had errors of justice cases for Norway presented and from the UK and elsewhere in the world because we have different videos and documentaries and illustrations from our own setting. They recognise these different elements and they recognise that they have used both manipulative and coercive techniques at times also torture.  

28:05 

Actually, quite often torture, depending on which country you’re in, to gain a confession, and at the same time, when they think back on this, they will know that I’m not quite sure. They will have that question. I’m not quite sure that we actually got the right guy. So you can see that there’s a lot of doubt and they have a lot of experience so they’ve been through this many times. So I think that’s also why they instantly recognise that there’s something here.  

28:35 

And I think we lack any studies of this. But I think that, at least from my perception, when we work both Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe and the Pacific, everywhere we go these are, of course very different contexts and different countries and cultures. But at the same time, it’s almost like there’s a sort of subcultural policing, sort of a kind of mindset amongst particularly investigators because they do have the same job, they’re trying to solve the crime. And it’s a theory we have that we haven’t been able to test or prove. But it’s at least a sort of assumption that we’re making that when you start discussing methods of investigations and the tools that accompany an investigation, you’re immediately speaking within certain sort of boundaries or a kind of culture of work which is more similar than different.  

Børge Hansen: But in at the face of it.  

29:35 

You know, investigative interviewing and the way you work is open-ended questions, not leading, no coercion. And then if you’re a police detective in Vietnam or Indonesia and you have time restraints. You have lots of cases. You probably have bosses demanding and yelling at you. You want to get more stuff done faster. It’s counterintuitive, right? 

30:04 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. These are the first questions we get. So, you know, investigative interviewing places great emphasis on planning and preparation. Of course, depending on the case, it can be 5 minutes or it can take weeks. If it’s a massive case, there’s a lot of planning and preparation. If someone has stolen your bike, it’s simpler and faster. So they immediately sort of latch onto that and that’s also through training and then through retraining and further development. You know, we can talk about planning and preparation in the sense that you know that will save you time down the line. But of course the major breakthrough comes when they actually try it. 

30:52 

Because, of course, we also see examples from many different countries of things that are, well, traditional interrogations, even the use of torture, where it’s not efficient at all. It creates a lot of mistakes. It doesn’t give you the information you need. It completely destroys all trust in the police, in the state. So no one’s going to come forward, you know, no one’s going to go to the police and say I have something to tell you. You will shy away from the police as much as you can and that will hurt any kind of investigation. 

31:26 

We’ve seen examples of videos where the police officer or the investigator doesn’t even know who the suspect is. They don’t know the name. They hardly know the crime that they’re suspected of having committed. So, the conversation starts off in a very strange and bizarre way and it takes a very strange direction as well. That’s not efficiency and it’s not professionalism either.  

Børge Hansen: If you tie it back to SDG-16, which is justice. So having justice is trust in the system and the processes.  

32:09 

So, if you are convicted of a crime that you might not have done, that erodes trust. So you could say, OK, well, it seems that you’re more effective in the short term, but you know, it’s not as effective for building a society where you have less crime or more safety and stronger institutions.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. And you can also add that there is a general trend amongst the sort of more positive trends in the world today where fewer and fewer courts will convict on the basis of a confession alone. You need more evidence. So, you know, in the past it would be enough to have the confession. It was sort of the queen of the evidence, but that’s no longer the case in more and more jurisdictions around the world.  

32:58 

So police faced that challenge as well, that if I only get the confession, it’s not enough for a conviction.  

Børge Hansen: Ok, so then sounds like it makes the job of the police harder. In some ways. 

 33:07 

Gisle Kvanvig: It does because, you know, the bar is being raised and I think that this feeds into other part of the motivation. I see several sources of motivation for the officers that we work with. And of course we’re lucky because we very often get to work with some of the best investigators and we need them on board to begin with because they are the people that sort of set the standards internally inside of the police and they are also the sort of champions of the force. So they’re being looked up to by younger colleagues. So it’s very important to get these people on board in that thinking. 

33:46 

But if you look at the motivation, it has many different sources because one key aspect of it is what we’re discussing now, which is professionalism. These people want to do a professional job. Of course, you will find plenty of examples of people who simply don’t care. And those, you know, those are not the people that we’re trying to reach, but we’re trying to reach the people that actually do care about their job. And they want to be professional investigators. They want to conduct a solid investigation.  

34:18 

They want to produce evidence and they want to have a proper trial. And so there’s a massive curriculum and there are many theories and tools for them to apply to their work. You don’t have to travel far in Europe, and you will find police that knows nothing about this at all. But this is, you know, certainly something that’s motivational. How can I be a better investigator?  

34:48 

So you have that aspect and then there’s also the sort of more human aspect, which is that we have yet to come across any officer that really enjoys using a lot of violence or even torture. Most of them will fairly quickly say that it’s the least favourite part of their job. It’s something that I have to do. It’s part of our practice. It’s just standard operating procedure that we will beat them up a little bit before we talk to them or do even worse if we don’t get the answers that we want. 

35:20 

But I don’t feel good about it. It hurts me as a human being and I just don’t feel good about myself and I don’t feel professional. So I think there is also that human dimension to the motivation as well.  

Børge Hansen: So you said you started out in Vietnam and Indonesia and this is, i’m guessing, 10 to 15 years ago.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes, this was in 2011. Yeah. 

35:50 

Børge Hansen: And where through the world has this journey taken you guys?  

Gisle Kvanvig: Well, I mean, we are too small to work everywhere, which is also a reason for why we turn to the UN because we wanted the United Nations to get on board and deliver trainings on this subject as well. So, training architecture is coming into being and gradually falling into place. It will take some time, but it’s coming and now we are working in different ways and on different levels in about 15 countries. So in Latin America, Western Africa, Ukraine here in Europe and then also several countries in Asia, so Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Asia. 

36:39 

Børge Hansen: Do you see that there are regional differences in how your message is being received and maybe even operationalised?  

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think that depends a lot on the crime context of the country. I mean, there’s a big difference when you look at the kind of crime they’re investigating in Indonesia, for instance, there’s a lot of corruption. Corruption is a big issue for the Indonesians. So the police officers that we started working with there very early on were from the corruption unit. If you move to Brazil it’s violent crimes or homicides. 65,000 homicides a year when we started. 

37:21 

Of course, this also has a lot to do with poverty and who’s in power, which president Brazil has. So we see the homicide rate declining now under President Lula, but at this point, it’s still an enormous homicide rate. And that means that they think differently in the sense that they need different kinds of evidence for these kinds of cases. 

37:51 

And they are, to some extent, looking for different things. So you would have as an example in Brazil, they would say that their problem is that the context they’re working with is exceedingly violent. They are very violent. There’s a lot of homicides, but there’s also a lot of police shootings. And it just means that there’s no trust between them and the citizens, which means that it’s very difficult to gather evidence through interviewing. And there’s also less of an emphasis on gathering evidence in total, which means that it hurts their prosecutions because they don’t have enough evidence to prosecute. 

38:33 

So the prosecutor will simply not accept their case. So you will have homicides or rapes or whatever they are that never go to trial. And then they will report back that, you know, through applying investigative interviewing, they get more evidence than they get more prosecutions. And that for them, of course, is important in a very professional sense.  

Børge Hansen: So the whole mix of sustainability goals need to come into play and this is an important part of that to help improve safety in the country. 

39:00 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And thing we have to be very honest about this as well because it’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your problems. I remember meeting the chief of the homicide unit in Brazil and I think her precinct alone had 5000 homicides a year. And you know we had to be very honest and say that this is just humbling and we don’t really know how much this is going to help you. 

39:27 

I mean, what we can. But she was adamant that we need something to develop our professionalism. We need something that can help us interact with citizens in such a way that it generates more trust and we build better relations. And of course, it’s poverty-related, all this violence around us, and there are many things we can do that we as police cannot sort of know about that. 

39:57 

But you know, we have to focus on what we can do. And the morale in general is very low. We don’t feel good about ourselves and we are struggling with our relations with the local communities and we want to do better. And I see this as one avenue where we can sort of take this and we can become better at the job that we do. And that’s the part of this whole big puzzle that has to be solved. 

 40:27 

That is our responsibility.  

Børge Hansen: You mentioned another country that might not have the same issue. It’s in Brazil and poverty as a problem and you mentioned Ukraine and I know that you work quite a lot with Ukrainians. And so their problem is, obviously we all know that there’s a war going on there. Talk a little bit about the journey that you have set out together with the Ukrainians. 

41:02 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, I mean, the Ukrainian cooperation is really interesting because it’s only recently that we started having much more frequent cooperation. We met them, I think, the first time we met them was back in 2017. And so, of course, I mean, for Ukrainians, the war started with the invasion of Crimea. 

Børge Hansen: Is it a consequence of the war in Crimea? Or is it other things that led up to you guys?  

41:33 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think other things because from what I recall, the first time, the first group of Ukrainians we met, they were a mix of people from the National Preventive Mechanism Against Torture, some NGO’s and also some people from the state prosecutor’s office. We met at a conference and they were, and this conference was basically about investigative interviewing. So they were very keen on this. And then we had a presentation on the work that we did in Southeast Asia at the time and that we had sort of planned doing something in Brazil. 

42:12 

And then they came to us and said, look, do you have any materials that you can share? Fortunately, we had developed something called the Convention Against Torture initiative. We developed a very short manual on investigative interviewing and we were able to send them that together with a few articles. And then we didn’t really hear from them for about a year I think. But then Asbjørn Rachlew from Oslo Police District where he was working at the time, he was invited to Kiev in 2018 to give a presentation. So he gave a sort of mini training and presentation. 

42:48 

Børge Hansen: And he’s quite vocal about interview techniques and the need for that in the Norwegian police or the journey that Norwegian police and some of the errors of justice that we’ve done in Norway. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes absolutely. So together with Ivar Fahsing, the other police officer that we have attached to our programme on a more permanent basis, Asbjørn is one of our, well, I mean it’s probably the wrong term, but he’s almost like our missionary for this. 

Børge Hansen: He’s an evangelist. 

43:18 

Gisle Kvanvig: But he went there in 2018 and then again we didn’t hear from them for very long apart from a few emails.  

Børge Hansen: But in this case, it was them inviting you. So we’re not exporting Nordic or Western European values here. They’re actually requesting them. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. I mean that’s the sort of I don’t think we have exported anything since almost 2015. Since then, it’s all been requests. We have numerous countries that want assistance, but we’re not capable of it. I mean we don’t have the resources in terms of manpower and money to to support them all. 

43:59 

Børge Hansen: So why do you think the Ukrainians are inviting you guys with Asbjørn to Ukraine for to talk about these things?  

Gisle Kvanvig: The work that we’re doing with them now started in December 2022. When they first requested assistance in looking at some guidelines for interviewing prosecutors and police within the context of war crimes investigations in Ukraine. So we provided some inputs to those guidelines and we had a brief discussion and then they came back and said that look, we would really like to cooperate on training of our police and prosecutors. And of course, we said, that would be really, really interesting because it’s a very complex environment because of all these war crimes cases, 10s and 10s of thousands of them as well as just regular crime, corruption, homicide, rape and all the rest of it. 

45:09 

But what they are interested in doing and what we are sort of developing together with them is this strategy for putting in place this sort of standard of investigation and interviewing across the country both for workarounds cases but also other criminal offences.  

Børge Hansen: Because you split between war crime and other criminal offences. That means there is a difference here? 

Gisle Kvanvig: There is a difference. And I think first and foremost what most people have to remember about war crimes is that the likelihood that most of these cases will be prosecuted is very low. Now, unfortunately, collecting evidence and war crimes cases is notoriously difficult. 

45:53 

But interviewing, interestingly enough, if done correctly, can help in the sense that you can secure better evidence because, very often, the crime scene is non-existent. I mean it’s a bomb site for instance. So of course you can take pictures of it and so on. But again it’s hard and the crimes are different and even rape within the context of war, it will be hard to get the forensics that you need and so on and so forth. But you can have interviews with victims and witnesses and if they are done correctly it means that you stand a better chance of collecting evidence that will stand the test of trial and done in the wrong way. 

46:40 

Particularly if you use what we normally see in the context of war crimes is that people use a lot of photos and videos because they’re everywhere and the second that these are spread either on the Internet or you start showing these pictures around you’re contaminating the evidence. So that will basically destroy your chances in court. Which is another reason why there are so few convictions in this kind of war crimes cases that simply the evidence is either deemed not trustworthy, so it’s excluded from the chain of evidence or is nonexistent. 

47:17 

Børge Hansen: The hardship in Ukraine, it’s you know they’re in the middle of a war and they’re also retraining themselves as you said with new practises and I’m guessing also legislation to support this. And then the amount of war crime cases and regular criminal cases are just growing immensely right now, because there’s the war is still going on. 

47:42 

If we go back to the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, it started out with understanding or having an understanding of how the Norwegian police worked, and it tried to learn from that and take it. Are there any learnings from around the world that you guys have fed back to Norway, the UK, and the other countries where this has been a practice for a while now? 

 48:06 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. I think it’s continuous because what’s so fascinating to see now is that more and more countries, jurisdictions, and police services are engaging with this. You know, they’re driving innovation at a speed that didn’t happen before because you would have basically the UK, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, very, very few countries that were engaged in the field of research and practise around the investigative interviewing. 

48:37 

Suddenly, you’re looking at massive countries like Brazil, Nigeria, which is coming up as another very, very large country. You’re looking at South Asia, a country like Pakistan where they’re working with this. I know there’s interest in India and Indonesia 300 million people. So suddenly, you have a lot more brains engaged in this whole field both on the research side but also on the practice side.  

49:08 

And I think that we learn from each other, we borrow both from Norwegian police, but also we get to borrow police officers from the UK. And I think that what they also feel is that there is a sort of proper exchange of competence and experience and that this is driving development forward. 

Børge Hansen: So for Giesle and Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, what’s up next? 

49:39 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think what’s up next for us, in particular, is the gender dimension of what we’re doing. We’re sort of studying it now and looking to expand on it. And again we’re looking at present, we’re looking at some of the research that we can find on gender based violence like rape or abusive relationships, domestic violence, abuse of children, these sort of crimes. And then looking at if there are better ways of investigating those kinds of crimes. And there’s some very interesting research and there are some very interesting pilots on this around the world and it’s all based on the same skill set that investigative interviewing teaches.  

50:30 

So you need investigative interviewing to also enhance your relationship violence investigations and I think that’s what we’re going to see if we can incorporate in different ways because the very initial training, investigative interviewing training cannot encompass too many things. It cannot be too ambitious, but at least you know you can have an illustration of the different topics and specialisations available. Like there’s specialisation on interviewing children. 

51:01 

There’s enhanced cognitive interviewing in terms of interviewing traumatised people or people suffering from memory loss and then you could also have a particular field on gender-based violence, rape and and the sexual abuse of children. 

51:21 

Børge Hansen: I think we were lucky to have yourself and your team working on these things and helping to drive these initiatives throughout the world. So thank you very much. Gisle, thank you for being on the podcast.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you for having me. 

51:35 

Børge Hansen: Thank you for joining us. In this episode, we learned how Norwegian Centre for Human Rights is working towards promoting fair trials for people across the world. Thanks for tuning in to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt from Rebel in the Centre of Oslo with me. Børge Hansen. Catch you in the next episode.