Preliminary Research Inquiry

What are the key issues, options, and opportunities for using crowdsourced tools to collect evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses in the Ukraine war?

Initial Questions

• What are the key functional and legal requirements and desired capabilities for crowd-sourced gathering of war crimes evidence? (eg authentication of source and evidentiary artifacts, what will be needed later in a tribunal for admissibility and persuasive power of such evidence, what metadata is needed to usefully manage the corpus of evidence as part of a large e-discovery or litigation management corpus, how is chain of custody adequately assured and what is adequate assurance in this context)?
• What other investigation or historical affordances can such evidence provide outside of a war crimes tribunal, etc)?
• What are the risks and threats to the operatiion and use of an app, platform, service or other system for crowd-sourced evidence gathering and storage and use of data?
• What user interface and user experience would be most helpful and usable for individuals to operate the input methods for providing such evidence?
• How can the privacy and security of individual users be protected?

Relevant Resources

• Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova’s new government portal where the public can report war crimes they witness in Ukraine: warcrimes.gov.ua (English machine translation)

• Podcast episode by law.MIT.edu on the topic of how technology can support establishing evidence of war crimes for international tribunals with guest, David Hasman, who is the Information Systems Officer for the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for ISIL Crimes (aka UNITAD): https://law.mit.edu/pub/podcastpage

• The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations (“A Practical Guide on the Effective Use of Digital Open Source Information in Investigating Violations of International Criminal, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law”): https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/OHCHR_BerkeleyProtocol.pdf

Other Examples

• https://open-archive.org/

• https://mnemonic.org/

• https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/27/follow-the-russia-ukraine-monitor-map/

To suggest relevant resources or ask about collaborating on future research and development

• We may lead, coordinate or participate in near future efforts among contributors to help develop tools and solutions.

• Use this contact form to communicate about this war crimes research in the section titled “Additional questions/comments”: https://forms.gle/qKbNnMTbT89VGzf47