On Monday, the Court of Appeals said the accounts of nearly 38,000 residential school survivors can be destroyed after 15 years.

The records are the testimony of former residential school students during the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Independent Assessment Process; detailing the horrific physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual abuses they endured while attending the state and church run institutions.

The Appeals court upheld a former decision that to protect the privacy of the persons who testified that the documents should be destroyed. But affirmed that the testimonies of former students are not government documents but stories that belong to the survivors.

The Appeals court ruled that survivors have a period of 15 years to register their storied to be preserved by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s archives at the National Research Centre at the University of Manitoba.