A/HRC/60/18 and structures suspected of perpetrating crimes. As required by its terms of reference, the Mechanism seeks both inculpatory and exculpatory information from all relevant parties regarding serious international crimes committed in Myanmar. The Mechanism seeks to ensure that a survivor/victim-centred, gender-sensitive and trauma-informed approach underpins its methodologies, processes and systems, particularly in its interactions with witnesses, sources and other information providers. 37. The Mechanism places great importance on the collection of first-hand witness testimony, which is essential to building criminal cases. Thus, in-person interviews and the collection of valuable and probative information through investigative missions are a critical element of the Mechanism’s evidence collection. Investigative missions involve direct engagement with victims, witnesses, civil society actors and other stakeholders. Detailed, signed witness statements and other materials are securely collected and transmitted to the Mechanism’s electronic information management system using encrypted tools. This ensures the protection and confidentiality of the information and of information providers. To date, the Mechanism has collected over 590 witness statements and screening notes. In addition, the Mechanism has prepared more than 500 investigation notes documenting information collected from various sources and leads. Evidence analysis and sharing 38. The Mechanism has further strengthened and refined its methodologies for analysis and sharing. Since the establishment of the Mechanism, this has resulted in the preparation of 120 packages comprising more than 1.2 million items of supporting evidence, metadata authentication and analysis that have been shared with national and international authorities. Furthermore, the Mechanism continues to evolve its use of emerging technologies in response to the growing scale of evidentiary material and the changing digital landscape. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence and secure tools and technologies are enabling the Mechanism to strengthen and augment its overall analytical capabilities, by ensuring that the evidence collected is accessible and searchable and that materials are preserved in a manner that will allow their use in future legal proceedings according to the Mechanism’s mandate. 39. For example, the Mechanism developed the Case Analysis Platform, an evidence analysis tool that enables the Mechanism to systematically extract, organize and annotate facts from evidentiary material. The Case Analysis Platform facilitates the Mechanism’s efforts to build coherent files pertaining to key legal and factual elements required to prove crimes. The Mechanism is also developing a tool that utilizes computer vision technology to detect designated items such as weapons and insignia as well as disturbing or graphic content in photos and videos to minimize investigative teams’ exposure to material that may lead to secondary trauma. 40. To optimize the Mechanism’s investigations, the Mechanism is also developing a system based on digital identifiers to enable comparisons of potential connections between persons and entities of interest, documented incidents, and digital footprints such as IP addresses, email addresses, call data records, social media identifiers and other metadata derived from open sources. The Mechanism continues to build its capacity to identify transactions and assets linked to incidents by leveraging information obtained through its collection activities and its engagement with sources, as well as through specialized corporate and financial intelligence tools. These efforts have led to an enhanced understanding of command structures and funding sources, supporting analysis across investigative priorities and lines of inquiry. 41. Due to the vast linguistic diversity of Myanmar, where over 100 languages are spoken, the Mechanism continues to face translation challenges. There are also huge challenges in evidence processing and analysis due to language and script complexities. The majority of the materials collected are written in the Myanmar language (Burmese) which has distinct character encoding – a process of assigning numbers to graphical characters of human language – and a variety of file formats. This linguistic complexity requires robust and timely translation and interpretation capabilities for effective analysis. The Mechanism has developed advanced optical character recognition tools that convert scanned or image-based documents into machine-readable texts. To address the absence of readily available tools for 10 GE.25-10777