RightsCon Tunis 2019

In recent years, war crimes investigators and human rights defenders have come to increasingly rely on social media and other open source information to build cases for prosecution, advocate for international action in the face of human rights violations and combat mis/disinformation. The growing volume of publicly available information on the internet provides, in many situations, a first-hand point of view of what is happening on the ground in armed conflicts around the world. Such content could support the findings of commissions of inquiry or serve as powerful evidence in legal proceedings. However, in order to be admissible and given proper weight in court, investigators must be able to show that the information was collected and preserved in line with accepted international standards and demonstrate the integrity and veracity of the information based on a set methodology. When the International Criminal Court issued the first arrest warrant based primarily on open source videos in August 2017, no such standards or methodologies existed. That is why in late 2017, the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center launched an important initiative to develop an international protocol on open source investigations. In this strategic roundtable, drafters and collaborators on this protocol will speak about the process and goals of this project, as well as the needs it addresses for investigators working in a number of different contexts.