A/HRC/12/19 page 8 25. Many truth commissions have had difficulty obtaining military records; a few have been able to use declassified documents obtained from other countries that shed light on military activities. A commission may obtain security-classified documents from the Government, but have difficulty getting them declassified for publication in the commission’s report. D. Preserving the records of transitional justice institutions 26. The records of a transitional justice institution must be managed competently while the institution is active. Then, when the institution completes its work, its records need to be appraised and the portion judged to be permanently valuable should be transferred directly to an archive. 27. Transitional justice institutions may be international or national. The national institutions may be a special part of an existing institution (court, prosecutor) or wholly new ad hoc bodies (vetting committees, truth commissions, reparation panels). Most of them will be Government institutions, with the exception of court monitoring projects and some truth commissions, such as the truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church in Guatemala. 28. It is important to distinguish between national records and records of ad hoc international bodies. While there are obvious local interests in both types of records, the responsibility for preserving the records of, for example, a national truth commission is clearly national, while the responsibility for preserving the records of a body established under the United Nations is clearly the responsibility of the United Nations. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the work of the Advisory Committee on the Archives of the United Nations ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which was commissioned to draft a study on the future of the archives of both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The study included an independent analysis on how best to ensure future accessibility to the archives, protect their security and preservation, as well as assess possible locations. A final decision regarding the archives of both ad hoc tribunals will be taken by the Security Council. 29. The records of the national courts that prosecute post-conflict cases should be considered part of the records of the larger justice sector, including the records of the prosecutors and investigators, the prisons and detention centres, and the police. These are records that belong in the Government’s archives system, even if the court was a temporary one set up to hear special cases, or the prosecutor was appointed only to undertake post-conflict prosecutions. 30. The records of the unique transitional bodies - vetting panels, reparations commissions, truth commissions - are not part of the regular records system of the Government, yet they create vital records for the nation and its history. These bodies, hearing testimonies, may develop statistical profiles, write reports, adjudicate, grant compensation, and create an entire range of modern archival materials. The records they create are administrative and investigative, case files and reports, published and unpublished, paper and electronic and audio-visual, databases and radio broadcasts. 31. Of the 20 truth commissions whose work was completed by 2005, the records of 3 commissions are in the custody of the United Nations archives, 3 are controlled by the country’s national archives, 11 are in various locations, governmental and non-governmental,