[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law, an Executive Board Member of Airwars, and the Managing Editor of Opinio Juris.] In a New York Times essay published last week, Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense in President Barack Obama’s first term and Director of Homeland Security in his second, seeks...
[Dr Sabina Garahan is a lecturer in criminal law and human rights at the University of Essex Law School and Director of the Essex Human Rights Centre Clinic. Dr Sarah Zarmsky is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law with a research focus on international criminal law, human rights, and new and emerging technologies.] Introduction Detention is often associated with the perpetration...
[Madeeha Majid is a legal consultant with OpenNyAI – Agami and an international lawyer based in Srinagar, Kashmir] On 19 July 2024, Judge Dire Tladi, in his powerful declaration to the Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, emphasized that Israel’s policies and practices reveal ‘a clear intent to dominate the Palestinian...
[Julia Emtseva is assistant professor of law at HEC Paris] I had never considered myself a law and technology person. Likewise, I never imagined that open-source investigations (OSINT) would touch me directly, beyond distant and abstract conflicts where technology was used to trace evidence of international crimes. That changed in September 2022, when my country, Kyrgyzstan, stood on the brink of full-scale armed conflict with its...
[Pedro R. Borges de Carvalho is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Institute for International Law and a research fellow at ATHENE – German National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity] Mass atrocities often leave scars on the Earth’s surface that forensic methodologies can decrypt given the right technological capabilities. High-resolution satellite imagery analysis is one such method, and it is fundamental for both forensics...
[Christine Carpenter is an international lawyer, and a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD Candidate in international relations and politics at the University of Cambridge] To live in a crisis zone today is to be watched, recorded, and broadcasted—often without one’s knowledge or consent. Digital evidence plays a central role in investigating international crimes and human rights abuses—as has been demonstrated vis-à-vis Israel’s atrocities...
[Christiane Wilke is a Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa and collaborates with Airwars on a project examining legal and factual claims in US military civilian casualty assessments] How do we look at genocide, and how does the vantage point shape what we see? Armed conflicts and genocides are frequently represented using the aerial perspective: satellite images, drone video footage,...
[Dr. Giuliana Rotola is a space law and policy specialist whose work spans sustainability, governance, Indigenous methodologies, and post-colonial approaches to space norms. She is fellowship coordinator at the Palestine Space Institute.] Earth Observation as Witness to Systematic Destruction International law defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy a protected group. Amnesty International's December 2024 report argues that Israel’s offensive on Gaza includes such prohibited...
[Laliv Melamed is a professor of digital film cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt] On the evening of 27 October 2023, the IDF spokesperson released a CGI (computer-generated imaging) model of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. The model draws on what is by now a familiar arsenal of digital forensics. It is based on data collected from aerial imagery, maps, and...
[Dr. Akanksha Bisoyi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Professorship of Law, Innovation and Legal Design, Technical University of Munich in Germany] Introduction Photographs as legal tools for truth-telling reflect the aphorism ‘seeing is believing’. These images range from visual depictions of war crimes to human rights violations, affirming their role in the objective portrayal of historical events. Photographs are forensic evidentiary mediums that are, paradoxically,...
[Marina Aksenova is an associate professor of international and comparative criminal law at IE University] Introduction The two projects inspiring this post – Cartography of Genocide by Forensic Architecture and Anatomy of Genocide by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – have in common the idea of a multi-dimensional approach to international law. In the case...
[Stefania Di Stefano is a postdoctoral researcher in online content moderation at Cnam, Paris. Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is an assistant professor of public international law at Sciences Po Law School, Paris. Barrie Sander is an assistant professor of international law at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is senior lecturer in law at Queen Mary University of...