Conducting a National Inquiry into Systemic Patterns of Human Rights Violation An alternative approach is to divide issues or sectors across the public hearings so that, for example, academics appear in one venue and government officials in another and NGOs in a third. If this approach is taken, the inquiry should be careful to ensure that, on each occasion, victims who live locally have opportunities to speak, even if there is some repetition in what they have to say. Another approach is to look at different aspects of the issue or situation at different public hearings. Take an inquiry into rural education as an example. The inquiry might examine aspects affecting children with disability in one public hearing and aspects affecting indigenous children at another. The particular aspect to be examined and the particular location for the hearing can be chosen to ensure an appropriate match between the aspect and the location. So indigenous education could be examined in a hearing conducted in an indigenous community and education for children with disability might be examined in a hearing conducted in a school that caters especially for them. Choosing appropriate locations is as important as choosing the most relevant people to give evidence. 11.9. RECORDING THE EVIDENCE Before the hearings begin, the inquiry will need to decide how the evidence to be provided should be recorded. Arrangements will need to be made for the recording, in whatever form the inquiry requires. Recording is important because the evidence given at the public hearings is important. The inquiry will want to ground its findings and recommendations as firmly as possible in the evidence it receives. That is what gives the findings and recommendations legitimacy and strength. In doing this, the inquiry’s report should refer to and quote extensively from the evidence given at the hearings, including the actual words of victims, witnesses and other experts. Direct quotation enables the victims, witnesses and other experts to speak directly, in their own words, to readers of the inquiry report. It gives the report a personal dimension and an immediacy that more academic or legal writing cannot give. The easiest and least expensive means of recording hearings is audio recording. Audio recording requires little equipment – only a microphone near the speaker and a recording device – and little expertise. Inquiry staff themselves could do the recording. For a higher-quality recording, the inquiry could arrange broadcast-quality recording by professional technicians with professional equipment. This would enable the recordings to be edited and used in audio and video programmes about the inquiry. Video recording is also possible and these days it can be as easy to do as audio recording. However, it can also be considerably more expensive if it is to be recorded at high quality for telecast purposes. Some high quality video footage of the public hearings should be taken, nonetheless, for use in news programmes and documentaries about the inquiry but it is probably not financially feasible to do high quality video recording of the whole hearings. Whether the hearings are recorded by audio alone or by video, the inquiry will require at least some transcripts of the evidence so that it can be referred to and quoted in the report. Full transcription is desirable but it is very expensive. It may be sufficient to ensure that the evidence of all witnesses before the hearings is well indexed to enable material to be accessed easily from the audio or video tapes and transcribed only to the extent required. 54