Publication page

Methodology

How the archive classifies incidents, handles legal uncertainty, and separates primary documents from reporting.

Last updated March 25, 2026

Purpose

War Crimes 2026 is a public research archive tracking alleged rights abuses, coercive removals, constitutional conflicts, and attacks on democratic accountability linked to the Trump administration beginning on January 20, 2025.

The site is designed to function as a usable public record, not a social feed. Each entry is organized around an incident date, a current update date, a legal posture label, and a source trail that readers can inspect for themselves.

What The Title Means

The project title is editorial framing. It is not a blanket statement that every record on the site constitutes a completed or adjudicated war crime under domestic or international law.

Each incident page separates:

  • reported facts from cited public sources
  • official acts acknowledged by the government
  • claims made in litigation or public advocacy
  • judicial findings where a court order or ruling is cited
  • the publication's own severity assessment

If a page does not cite a ruling or operative official record for a legal conclusion, readers should treat legal terms on the site as documented analysis or allegation, not as a final adjudication.

Inclusion Standard

The archive publishes only incidents that meet all of the following thresholds:

  • Publicly sourceable: supported by reporting, public filings, government records, or other publication-safe material
  • Dateable: tied to a specific incident date or a clearly documented time period
  • Classifiable: assignable to the archive's category, severity, and legal-posture taxonomy
  • Explainable: describable in plain language without implying more certainty than the record supports
  • Auditable: accompanied by a visible source trail

The archive does not publish anonymous raw-source claims, protected identities, or unpublished reporting notes from the private research workflow.

Source Handling

Incident pages split references into two groups when the public record allows it:

  • Source documents: court orders, court filings, official proclamations, executive actions, or similar primary materials
  • Linked reporting: journalism, secondary analysis, and other contextual public reporting

The archive prefers primary documents when they are available and publication-safe. When only reporting is public, the page says so.

Public Data And Reuse

The archive also publishes machine-readable public data for readers who want to audit, cite, or reuse the reporting surface without scraping HTML.

  • /archive.json provides a structured export of the public archive
  • /archive.csv provides a tabular export of the same public record
  • incident/[slug].json provides the structured public record for an individual incident
  • /updates.json publishes the generated update ledger

These exports contain only publication-safe material already visible on the public site. They do not expose private research notes, unpublished drafts, or source-protection data from the private workflow.

Classification Rules

Severity

Severity is an editorial assessment of rights and rule-of-law risk. It is not a criminal sentence, charge, or tribunal judgment.

  • Critical Rights and Rule-of-Law Concern: unusually grave questions involving unlawful detention, refoulement, executive defiance, or severe due-process breakdowns
  • Serious Rights Violation: serious constitutional, statutory, or international-law concerns supported by strong public evidence
  • Major Abuse of Power: substantial institutional abuse, dismantlement, or coercive misuse of public authority
  • Significant Democratic Concern: serious democratic-accountability or rule-of-law harms that may not yet rise to the levels above

Legal Posture

Every incident page also carries a posture label:

  • Reported record: the page relies on reporting or public records, without citing a final judicial finding on the core legal question
  • Active litigation: courts are actively considering legality, remedy, or compliance issues tied to the incident
  • Judicial finding: the page cites a court ruling or operative order directly bearing on the contested conduct
  • Official executive action: the act itself is publicly acknowledged by the government, even if the legal critique remains contested

Update Policy

The archive preserves update history instead of silently rewriting entries. Material new sources, posture changes, and meaningful clarifications should be reflected in the incident's visible update log.

Routine copyedits may not receive their own update item. Corrections that materially change factual understanding, source attribution, or legal framing should.

For the public-facing correction and update policy, see Updates.

Limits

This site is not:

  • a court
  • a criminal indictment
  • legal advice
  • a substitute for a full investigative file
  • a secure channel for sensitive source contact

Coverage Gaps

The archive is still selective and incomplete. A missing incident does not mean the underlying conduct did not occur or did not matter. It may instead mean:

  • the public source trail is still too thin to meet the archive's inclusion standard
  • the event has not yet been converted from the private research workflow into a publication-safe record
  • the site does not yet have a stable category or dossier structure for the incident
  • the page would require source-sensitive or unpublished material that cannot be placed in the public repo

Readers with sensitive information should use the guidance on Source Safety. The public site currently does not offer SecureDrop or an equivalent anonymous submission system.