A/HRC/17/21 entity. It will need sub-units to develop plans, both administrative and archival. The archives administration also requires advisory bodies that include representatives from a broad range of civil society organizations. 42. The archival systems must establish where the records will be kept and for how long. When they are created, the records need to be easily available. The archives may later be moved to an intermediate archives, where the records are available to the originating office if needed. Later still, they can be moved to the central historical archives. This flow of records and information must be logical and understandable to both government and the public. The length of time that the records will remain at each stage and whether at the end they will be retained or destroyed also needs to be clearly set out by the governing policy or by a body established to make such decisions. 43. Despite the need of an inventory of public and private archives, private archives, experts said, may be outside the scope of the national archives law; private owners of important parts of the national heritage should be required by law to preserve and maintain their materials, which would include not exporting them without permission. It is important to have clear guidelines and a designated unit or person responsible for oversight. 44. An overview to archives and the right to truth in Argentina was presented in that regard. There has been major progress in Argentina, including in locating archives that have helped bring perpetrators to trial. These archives now form part of the nation’s memory. In cases of gross violations of human rights, the State must actively seek the truth about the past. 45. The records of the truth commission in Argentina are now part of the national archives of historical memory managed by the human rights secretariat. The State has made good use of archives in investigations of disappeared persons. For example, the partial archives of the fingerprint files of the Buenos Aires Police was used to help identify bodies and verify that these people had been victims of death squads. In 2010, the State adopted access rules for information held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and efforts are being made to find information in the records of Argentina’s embassies abroad. The Public Prosecutor’s Office signed an agreement with the Ministry of Defence allowing the Public Prosecutor to look at all archives that could be useful in prosecuting human rights violations. 46. Memoria Abierta holds its own archives, archives from other NGOs and private materials donated to it or copies thereof. In addition, archives of human rights organizations were built during the dictatorship, and they offer two particularly important kinds of information: documentation of habeas corpus appeals made by families about disappeared relatives and letters given to families in response to their claims. Memoria Abierta also creates documentation through oral interviews, of which 700 have been completed and made available online. It created an inventory of archives in Argentina in 2004, which has expanded to cover 45 archives in six countries. It is publicly accessible and searchable on the Memoria Abierta website. The website also has a body of documents that are easily accessible for prosecutors, including copies of documents from the trials of military leaders. 47. The seminar participants discussed the challenges associated with obtaining access to the records of the military. According to the experts, such access is important both in relation to human rights violations but also for the revision of the country’s history. An example of the establishment of military archives outside the national archives system, but based on similar archival principles, was presented. The military archivists are civilians but the director is a military officer, who can overrule the professional judgments of the staff. A number of problems have arisen with specific access requests, and there is no timeline for the declassification of military records. Views were expressed that military archives needed 10