A Record Is Only as Good as Its Labels

The six evidence classes

Confirmed

A documented failure: a procedural breach, official inquiry or court finding, an admitted error, or a fact-checked false claim.

Policy shortfall

A manifesto timetable, stated objective or public expectation compared against actual policy or delivery.

Disputed

The incident is real, but responsibility, motive, propriety or causal attribution remains contested.

Allegation

Complaints, investigations, indictments or accusations exist. An allegation, arrest or indictment is not treated as guilt.

Positive

Reforms or actions that count in the government's favour: the record cuts both ways or it is not credible.

Context

An outcome, indicator or cross-cutting pattern useful for scale and background, not itself a culpability claim.

Beside the class, every full record shows the report’s verbatimlabel (“Legal case — no conviction implied”, “Positive step — pending completion”), because the exact wording often carries the caveat that makes the record fair. Allegation-class records carry their verbatim label on everysurface they appear, however compact.

Inherited problems vs. current handling

Where an underlying problem predates the current government (organised-crime networks, structural debt, institutional decay), the record attributes only the government’s handling, continuation, remedy or failure to improve it. An inherited crisis is context; what was done about it is the accountability question.

How incidents are connected

Each record can link to related incidents where the source report explicitly records that relationship. The links help readers inspect the relevant evidence trail. They are not claims of a common conspiracy or a common perpetrator. The recurring mechanisms themselves are collected as eight patterns.

Sources, and records held back

Every published record links the reporting it consolidates. Where research identified a source trail but no direct publication link has been attached yet, the record is held out of publication (enforced in the database, not by editorial promise) until a citable link is added. Coverage varies by incident; unresolved items are labelled rather than rounded up to certainty.

Reference numbers are assigned sequentially, so gaps in the public sequence are normal: they are records currently held out of publication: as of edition 2026-08-24, 20 of the 90 records in this dataset, most awaiting a citable source. A record may also be temporarily withdrawn while a dispute or correction is being checked. A missing number says only that a record is held; it does not say why.

Taking a record down

Any record can be unpublished immediately, after which its permalink returns a plain 404 to the public, with no “removed” notice that would restate the claim. Every unpublish is logged internally with a reason. Records are corrected or withdrawn; they are never silently edited into something different, and reference numbers are never reused.