University Open Source Investigation Labs: A Conversation Between Queen’s University Belfast and the Hertie School

[Lydia Millar is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast and manager of the Digital Investigation Lab at the School of Law.

Filipe Castillejo Gaitán is a Colombian Human Rights and OSINT Researcher, former co-coordinator of the Hertie School Digital Verification Corps]

How did your respective open-source investigation labs begin?

Lydia (Queen’s University Belfast): In October 2023, the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) launched a clinical law project in which a small group of postgraduate students were trained to conduct open source investigations, with a focus on gathering evidence for GLAN’s ground-breaking cases.

Having just started my PhD at QUB that month, I thought this would be a brilliant opportunity to marry my academic interest in International Humanitarian Law with a desire to do something practical and useful.

Over the course of a year, myself and four other postgraduate students (a tiny group compared to other OSINT clinics) met every week to verify scores of attacks perpetrated by the Israeli Defence Forces against civilians in Gaza. Our supervisor, the formidable GLAN lawyer Dearbhla Minogue, eventually used the incidents we had verified in making a case against the UK Government over weapons exports to Israel in violation of IHL alongside Al-Haq.

After this experience, it was safe to say that I had caught the OSINT bug. While GLAN’s case ultimately failed before the UK High Court, I felt useful and empowered. So, when in June 2025 the clinical law project ended, I had a strong desire to keep building on the skills I had developed and to ensure that the momentum around open source investigations at QUB wasn’t lost. I wanted there to still be a space where students could learn, collaborate, and contribute to real-world accountability work through OSINT, a place that would carry forward the spirit of the original clinic.

Felipe (Hertie School DVC): Going back a few years, the Digital Verification Corps was founded by Amnesty International in 2016 to address three critical needs: engaging volunteers in meaningful human rights work, confronting the overwhelming volume of digital content documenting potential abuses, and training the next generation of human rights researchers in essential verification skills.

In 2023, the Hertie School DVC became the first EU-based corps, founded by a good friend and colleague, Pablo Maristany de las Casas, who had completed his professional year at Amnesty International, alongside Marija Ristic, the DVC manager at Amnesty. The initiative emerged from a pressing reality: a global shift toward conservative and authoritarian governance and a corresponding rise in human rights violations in the last decade.

I joined as a researcher in the founding cohort and was elected co-coordinator for the 2024 cohort alongside my colleague Georgia Langton. As preparation, Amnesty provided comprehensive two-day bootcamp training covering OSINT workflows, vicarious trauma management, and verification methodologies. We collaborated on projects aligned with Amnesty’s needs and received additional training on weapons analysis, archiving techniques, and trauma mitigation. Partnerships with organizations like Mnemonic and Human Rights Watch further enriched our skillset.

What kind of work do your labs focus on today?

Lydia: After participating in the clinical law project for 2 years, I now manage the newly branded Digital Investigation Lab, which is coordinated by Professor Luke Moffett. This year, the Lab has partnered with Airwars with the task of geolocating historic Russian airstrikes across Syria, contributing to its civilian harm archive, which already contains more than 10,000 allegations of harm across multiple conflicts.

Having Airwars as the Lab’s sole civil society partner has given our work a real sense of focus and direction. Rather than spreading our efforts thinly across multiple projects, we’re able to dedicate our time and energy to supporting one organisation in a sustained and meaningful way. This allows students to develop a deeper understanding of Airwars’ methodologies and standards, while also ensuring that our investigations feed directly into a larger, long-term body of work. In doing so, we’re not just completing discrete tasks, we’re contributing to an ongoing mission to improve transparency and accountability in conflict reporting.

Felipe: At the end of each academic year, internal elections are held to establish the new coordination team and ensure a proper handover. As many members transition to alumni status, it becomes essential to recruit new members who can continue working alongside the senior team. With every new cohort, new projects and priorities also emerge, which are directly assigned by Amnesty. Because the HSDVC operates under Amnesty’s mandate, maintaining discretion and confidentiality is crucial until projects are publicly released and reports are published. Currently, the new team is continuing an extensive project initiated last year on police brutality during protests in Berlin and is expected to receive a briefing on a new assignment in the coming weeks.

How do your teams manage collaboration and diversity?

Lydia: This year we made some important changes to the structure of the Lab. Our Lab has increased in size from 5 to 17 students from the Law School. The students come from a wide range of backgrounds representing the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Egypt, Palestine and India. For the first time, we have a number of Arabic speakers, which is incredibly important given that so much of the primary material originates in Arabic. Their linguistic and cultural fluency not only improves the accuracy of our verification work but also ensures that we approach each investigation with greater sensitivity and contextual understanding.

With the Lab growing in size this year, there’s been a noticeable buzz of energy. The diversity of backgrounds, skills, and experiences has created a rich environment where students learn as much from each other as from the investigations themselves. We’ve also introduced a buddy system, pairing students together to work collaboratively and provide mutual support. Having a buddy keeps everyone accountable, fosters a sense of shared purpose, and helps to build confidence in what can be challenging and emotionally demanding work.

Felipe: Our team’s diversity, both in terms of skills sets and the multicultural nature, proved invaluable across investigations. When examining protests and police brutality in northern Argentina, Spanish-speaking researchers who understood regional contexts could interpret nuances in footage and local dialects that would have eluded others. Arabic, Portuguese, and Turkish speakers similarly enabled verification work in Iran, Turkey, and Mozambique.

This linguistic and cultural diversity wasn’t merely convenient, rather it was essential to conducting thorough, contextually informed investigations that respected the complexity of each situation and the nature of Open Source investigation itself.

What are the main challenges your labs face within university structures?

Felipe: Our greatest challenges were centered around funding and institutional positioning. At the beginning, we existed in a “legal gray area”, as we were neither a “traditional” student club nor part of a research center at the university. This initially blocked our access to university funding because it was assumed that Amnesty bankrolled us directly, which wasn’t the case. Even after gaining access, resources remained scarce, with numerous student organizations competing for limited funds. The bureaucratic requirements were exhausting: semester-by-semester applications with no guarantee of approval forced us to think outside of the box and seek pro bono partnerships for training opportunities. It is worth noting that we all contributed on a volunteer basis, and we were fueled by passion and commitment to contribute as much as we could to the current human rights situation.

Another challenge was navigating institutional positionality on sensitive topics. The university’s directives occasionally clashed with our human rights mandate, a tension the Hertie Solidarity Collective has documented extensively, especially on the active genocide in Gaza. This became starkly apparent during the 2023 Digital Investigations Summit we organized, when we realized that external speakers were reviewed and vetoed by the university. These discussions were also held internally as not everyone agreed on what project to work on or the position of the DVC on various topics. As a democratic space, we always pushed for the plurality of voices and the possibility of dissent. People were always encouraged to give their opinions, constant feedback, and new proposals. Various projects were constantly available so that members could choose what to work on and votes were constantly being done on whether what we would communicate would be unanimous or just on behalf of certain members.

These moments forced us to confront questions about academic freedom, institutional risk aversion, dissent and the constraints placed on student-led initiatives addressing politically contentious human rights issues. Nevertheless, we still managed to carry out or work and be a part of crucial reports like Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the climate disasters’ impact on children and older people in Pakistan, among others. Despite these obstacles, the HSDVC demonstrated that universities can serve as crucial training grounds for digital human rights investigators. Our experience underscores both the potential and the precarity of student-driven initiatives operating at the intersection of human rights advocacy and academic institutions, spaces where impact is possible but never guaranteed, and where persistence often matters as much as skill.

Lydia: University open-source investigation labs are facing growing challenges around sustainability and funding. Much of their support comes from short-term, project-based grants rather than stable institutional investment, making it difficult to plan long-term research and staffing. Although the work relies on ‘open’ data, investigations still require costly infrastructure, including secure storage, software, and digital security systems. As a result, the sustainability of open-source investigations labs at universities is questionable given the lack of guaranteed funding.

Shrinking donor budgets and shifting institutional priorities have further strained this model, while humanitarian and peace-building efforts are losing support. As a result, many university labs are left vulnerable and over-dependent on external grants that rarely cover overheads or staff retention, threatening their ability to sustain meaningful, long-term investigative work.

While the Digital Investigation Lab isn’t immune to funding challenges, the fact that it runs largely on a voluntary basis helps ease the immediacy of this concern. At present, I don’t receive a salary for managing the Lab, nor is there a formal agreement that I should. That said, a small amount of funding has been set aside for me in the coming months, thanks to Professor Moffett’s support. However, I’ve always said I would manage the Lab regardless of funding, and my PhD stipend from the UK Government, as well as my tutoring job at Queen’s, keeps me afloat in the meantime.

What does concern me is what happens when I finish my PhD and eventually leave Queen’s. Can we count on another student volunteer from within the Lab to step up and take on its management without pay?

What worries me even more is that our students don’t receive university credit for their participation. Their work is also entirely voluntary. I dislike the expectation that students should work for free simply because they’re eager to gain experience that might one day help them secure a job. It feels exploitative. Still, the small portion of funding we have (again, thanks to Professor Moffett) goes toward something meaningful: bringing in the brilliant Nick Waters to deliver valuable OSINT training to new students. That, coupled with the engaging geolocation task set by Emily Tripp at Airwars, helps ease my worries. Even though the Lab runs on a voluntary basis, our students gain real skills and high-quality training that truly set them apart.

Looking ahead to next year, I am determined to secure accreditation for the students that participate in the Lab. At Queen’s, students may be awarded a ‘degree plus,’ which is an employability award that allows students to gain formal recognition and a certificate for the extracurricular experience gained the student’s degree. This is perhaps one avenue to better recognise the outstanding work and level of effort put into the Lab.

What motivates you to continue this work despite the challenges?

Felipe: We all contributed on a volunteer basis, and we were fuelled by passion and commitment to contribute as much as we could to the current human rights situation. Despite these obstacles, the HSDVC demonstrated that universities can serve as crucial training grounds for digital human rights investigators and that a collective will can achieve significant impact.

Lydia: Even though the Lab runs on a voluntary basis, our students gain real skills and high-quality training that truly set them apart. Having partners like Airwars and trainers like Nick Waters makes the work deeply rewarding and ensures we are contributing to meaningful, real-world accountability.