Fighting human rights violations through social media
Channel: UC Berkeley
Date: 2017-06-30

A growing workforce of college students is being trained worldwide to review and verify digital content — typically videos shot by citizens who witnessed atrocities —  that could help human rights lawyers prosecute war criminals.

For the full story, visit: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/28/worlds-next-generation-of-human-rights-investigators-meets-at-berkeley/

The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, along with Amnesty International, is hosting the June 26-29 event, which includes 16 students from Berkeley’s nearly year-old Human Rights Investigations Lab and 14 more from the University of Pretoria, the University of Essex and the University of Toronto, which subsequently launched their own labs. Soon, the University of Cambridge will join the group.

During the past school year, in partnership with Amnesty International, students in the four college labs — all part of Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps — have examined thousands of hours of YouTube videos, completed more than 6,000 work hours, investigated reports of human rights violations in more than a dozen countries and produced background intelligence for two major legal cases and contributions to efforts like the Syrian Archive.

The global summit already is proving its worth in that toolkit, with students eager to connect and to absorb each other’s best practices for tasks including how to effectively organize their findings for prosecutors, safely store their sensitive data, work effectively across continents and most easily pass their investigative methods to a new crop of students.

Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
Music: "CGI Snake" by Chris Zabriskie 

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