A/HRC/10/28 page 6 A. Tracing activities 12. Efforts made in this regard by ICRC and the International Commission on Missing Persons should be noted. The tracing activities carried out by ICRC during armed conflict and other situations of violence include collecting information about people unaccounted for and the circumstances under which they disappeared from their families, direct witnesses, the authorities and any other reliable sources. This information is crucial when tracing a person and establishing his or her fate. Such searches are made in places of detention, camps for internally displaced persons and refugees, morgues and remote areas. 13. Tracing activities also include supplying the authorities with lists of people unaccounted for, together with information on the circumstances in which they disappeared, requesting information on the location of graves and asking the authorities to allow for the recovery and identification of bodies. The tracing process also involves maintaining a constant dialogue with the authorities or armed groups in order to clarify the fate of missing persons. B. Collection, protection and management of data on missing persons 14. In its resolution 7/28, the Council recognized the need for the collection, protection and management of credible and reliable data on missing persons according to international and national legal norms and standards, and urged States to cooperate with each other and with other concerned actors working in this area, inter alia, by providing all relevant and appropriate information related to missing persons. In this regard, ICRC manages information and processes files on missing persons in many of the situations in which it operates. A standard software application that can be adapted to various situations allows ICRC to store, process and consult information on missing persons while ensuring a high level of data security and confidentiality of information. 15. OHCHR is in the process of developing a publication on the subject of human rights and archives. In this regard, a draft rule of law tool for post-conflict States on the subject of archives has been prepared with a view to its eventual publication. The publication will cover, inter alia, issues relating to truth-seeking and the right to know, including information relating to locating missing persons. 16. Locating missing persons and/or finding information about them requires searches of all possible records. Those of local government units, such as the police, are important, as is information that can be derived from cemetery and morgue records. The above-mentioned draft emphasizes that it is important to hypothesize about what happened to the person before, during and after the disappearance; if the working assumption is that the government was responsible for the disappearance, which government structure was probably involved at each stage of the process and what kinds of records were created should be determined. The draft notes that databases developed and maintained by non-government organizations during the conflicts, as well as by other organizations, such as ICRC or United Nations organizations, may also contain useful leads. 17. The issue of data management is also relevant to exhumation projects in the search for missing persons. While oral reports may provide information about possible sites of grave or mass graves, records of military or other government personnel who may have been assigned to,