FORETHICS: From Principles to Operational Decisions in Forensic Research

Forensic research may involve living persons, deceased persons, human tissues, genetic data, records and images, judicial exhibits, animals, and artificial-intelligence systems. Although existing ethical instruments establish essential principles, they provide limited operational guidance for determining what must be authorised, protected, and documented before a specific study begins. FORETHICS was developed through a normative functional analysis of internationally recognised ethical instruments and selected forensic literature. Requirements were organised according to the governance function performed and examined across object-specific research scenarios. The resulting framework translates general principles into a common decision grammar comprising five foundational components, seven independent ethical axes, eight object-specific modules, cross-cutting modifiers, fifteen Hard Stops, a ten-gate decision pathway, and ten study-specific Decision Cards. Its Core Rule requires every project to establish who lawfully controls access for the proposed use, why the research is scientifically necessary, which safeguards are required, and what minimum documentation demonstrates decision readiness. The ethical object assessed is therefore the proposed research use rather than the specimen, record, or dataset in isolation. FORETHICS does not replace national law, ethical review, judicial authority, data-protection assessment, or animal-welfare oversight. It provides a candidate architecture for making forensic research governance more explicit, traceable, and comparable across jurisdictions while preserving locally lawful pathways. The framework has undergone internal scenario-based examination but has not yet been externally or empirically validated. Multidisciplinary consensus, inter-rater testing, cross-jurisdictional evaluation, and prospective usability studies are therefore required before implementation as an international decision-support standard.