The Wagner Group’s Alleged Weaponization of Social Media in West Africa: How Sharing Degrading Content May Constitute an International Crime

[Dr Sarah Zarmsky is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law]

Thank you to Professor Kevin Jon Heller for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this post.

Introduction

Yesterday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that a confidential report had been submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) which argues that the Russia-linked Wagner Group has committed international crimes in West Africa using social media. The report is not yet publicly available and its authors have not been named, but according to AP:

‘Experts say the images, while difficult to verify, could serve as evidence of war crimes. The confidential brief to the ICC goes further, arguing that the act of circulating the images on social media could constitute a war crime, too. It is the first such argument made to the international court.’

The images described in the report are horrific. According to AP, the videos depict men in military uniforms ‘butchering corpses of what appear to be civilians with machetes, hacking out organs and posing with severed limbs’. Further, one man is recorded saying that he is going to eat someone’s liver, while another states he is trying to remove someone’s heart. It is not entirely clear from the article whether the videos depict any live civilians or if these acts are exclusively perpetrated against dead bodies. AP states that its analysis confirms that the body parts and military uniforms shown are genuine.

This report details yet another example, similar to those I have previously considered in relation to Ukraine and Palestine, of how perpetrators increasingly have weaponized social media to further degrade victims and their loved ones. In this post, I will outline how filming and sharing this footage likely constitutes the war crimes and crimes against humanity, apart from the heinous physical acts depicted, which are undoubtedly also crimes. It is important to note that this situation could also violate various actors’ obligations under international human rights law, which I have addressed in relation to a similar scenario here, however this is outside the scope of this blog post. As the report was submitted to the ICC, I will refer to the relevant Rome Statute crimes in the analysis.

War Crimes

It is first necessary to establish the contextual elements of war crimes, which under Article 8 of the Rome Statute require a nexus to armed conflict and that the crimes were committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes. As a brief analysis, the crimes were allegedly committed by the Wagner Group, a private Russian military force operating in Russia and Ukraine but also in Syria and several countries in Africa. Its troops have supported African government forces in combatting rebel groups and vice versa. While the specifics of exactly where the footage took place and against whom is not reported in the AP article, it states that the report focused on crimes committed in Mali. As reported by Human Rights Watch, Malian armed forces, the Wagner Group, and two Islamist armed groups (JNIM and ISGS) have been engaged in fighting since the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping mission at the end of 2023, and abuses have allegedly been committed against civilians by all sides. As this involves State forces and other non-State armed groups, the situation would likely constitute a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) if the intensity requirements are met. A deeper analysis of this is outside the scope of this post, but for the purposes of the following analysis, it can be reasonably assumed that the requirement of a nexus to armed conflict is met.

In addition, as provided by the Statute, the crimes should be committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes (although as reflected in the recent Draft Policy on Environmental Crimes Under the Rome Statute, the OTP currently does not see this as a necessary requirement; see paragraph 41). The AP article details numerous other instances where alleged Wagner accounts have shared or reshared degrading footage of abuses, and states that the report asks the ICC OTP to investigate alleged crimes committed in northern and central Mali between December 2021 and July 2024, including ‘extrajudicial killings, torture, mutilation and cannibalism’. It is therefore also likely that these crimes would meet the requirement of being part of a plan or policy given the frequent nature of the abuses.

In this situation, the most relevant war crime is outrages upon personal dignity, which is prohibited under Article 8(2)(c)(ii) for NIACs. As provided by the Elements of Crimes, the perpetrator must have ‘humiliated, degraded or otherwise violated the dignity of one or more persons’ and ‘the severity […] was of such a degree to be generally recognized as an outrage upon personal dignity’. This definition is similar to that established by the jurisprudence of the ICTY, where the Trial Chamber in Aleksovski found that outrages upon personal dignity are ‘particularly intolerable forms of inhumane treatment that cause more serious suffering than most prohibited acts falling within the genus’  and ‘must cause serious humiliation or degradation to the victim’. The Elements of Crimes also notes that ‘persons’ can include dead persons, which is relevant to this situation given the footage consisted of mutilating dead bodies and insinuating cannibalism. Therefore, even if the victim is not aware of the filming or does not live to see the footage circulated online, the degradation incurred through sharing the footage can still constitute the elements of the offence.

It is clear from the description of the footage above that this level of gruesome and humiliating content would constitute an outrage upon personal dignity. The bodies were horribly mutilated with machetes, the organs were hacked out, and the fighters posed with severed limbs. The fact that this footage was filmed and shared online constitutes severe degradation of the victims and undoubtedly exacerbates the harm to their loved ones.

Crimes Against Humanity

The contextual elements for crimes against humanity must also be met, namely that the crimes were committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Under Article 7(2)(a), ‘attack’ is defined as a course of conduct pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack. Again, as mentioned previously, there is limited information about the specifics of the report, but based upon the years of reported abuses against civilians by the Wagner group in the region, it could be reasonably assumed that these elements are met for the purpose of this analysis.

The act of sharing this content likely constitutes the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts under Article 7(1)(k). The elements of this crime are that the perpetrator inflicted great suffering, or serious injury to body or mental or physical health, by means of an inhumane act. The act must be of a character ‘similar to any other act referred to’ in Article 7(1). The Elements of Crimes defines ‘character’ as ‘the nature and gravity of the act’.

It is also clear from the description of the footage that the filming and sharing of this content inflicted great suffering or serious injury to mental health (assuming the victims were already dead before the mutilation took place, as this would constitute physical injury as well). The victims of this crime could include the family and friends of the victims in the footage, who will likely experience great suffering or injury to mental health should they be sent or come across this content, or simply by knowing that this footage of their loved one at their most vulnerable exists. In addition, it could be argued that great suffering is inflicted upon the civilian population in the region when such images are circulated, as this violent and horrifying content would undoubtedly instill fear amongst the community.

Conclusion

In addition to the above, for the alleged crimes to meet the admissibility requirements under Article 17 of the Rome Statute, they must be of sufficient gravity. As an investigation into the situation in Mali has already been opened at the ICC, if the acts in question are connected, it is likely that opening a case regarding them would be more easily justified in terms of gravity. Nevertheless, the serious degradation of the victims, the severe mental suffering inflicted on those who may know they are being filmed and their families who see the footage, and the fact that similar acts have been prosecuted as war crimes on their own in domestic jurisdictions demonstrate that the gravity threshold should be met.

Should the ICC decide to move forward with a case on the grounds mentioned above, there are practical challenges that will need to be addressed, such as how the OTP will obtain any original removed content from social media platforms or how the images will be independently verified as authentic. It will be important that all parties, including the Defence, are able to properly query any open source footage that is used as evidence, and for judges to be aware of how to evaluate such evidence. Of course, these alleged crimes will also be investigated using ‘traditional’ methods and likely will grouped with other ‘physical’ crimes should a case come to fruition as the ICC already has an open situation in Mali, but recognizing the harms inflicted on victims through sharing footage of crimes to social media would be a valuable and expressive step for the Court in the digital age.