We recognize the great risks that environmental defenders take to stand up to power, and understand that the collection of visual evidence is only one strategy communities use to protect their environmental human rights. We hope to support this resistance by sharing the Video as Evidence Environmental Defense Guide throughout the coming months via our global campaign that amplifies the calls for Earth Justice. Join us by re-posting our materials or retweeting us using the hashtag: #Video4Earth. 

Read from the full blog post by Dalila Mujagic and Meghana Bahar.

We’re sharing resources for those on the ground in Ukraine and Russia – who are navigating immense risks as they capture and share video documentation of potential human rights violations and war crimes. And, we’re sharing resources for those of us witnessing from a distance, so that we amplify grassroots truths and decrease the spread of mis/disinformation. 

Guidance for Frontline Documenters:

Visit our landing page for resources available in Ukranian and Russian here. 

Guidance for Allies:

As many of us watch, share, and try to make sense of the deluge of videos, photos, and reports coming out of Ukraine– much of which is authentic – we must also be vigilant not to amplify content that may be mislabeled or misleading. And the same is especially true for social media platforms like TikTok, which finds itself centrally placed in the flow of misleading videos related to a high stakes conflict like this. Here are tips and tools to help prevent you from sharing deliberate or accidental misinformation: 

• How to Verify Eyewitness Video: From our Video as Evidence Field Guide – we share techniques and tools to help verify that a video found online or sent by a source can be trusted as authentic. This resource is available in multiple languages including Ukrainian and Russian

• Visual Verification Tipsheet: These tips will help you verify images and videos that you see online.

You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and share our resources with your networks. 

Inside the Guide you’ll find in-depth research and examples, practical tips and guidance, case studies and exercises.  And this Q&A blog post with WITNESS’ U.S. Immigration Legal Fellow and author of the Guide, Leila Shifteh, offers more about what the Guide is and who it’s for. 

Download the full guide here. You can also access just the Legal section here, or just the Filming section here. 

And join our Facebook Live conversation to learn more about using video as evidence in immigration legal proceedings on December 8th 2pmEST to hear from Leila Shifteh,  author of the guide,  Michelle Quintero, senior attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services’s New York Immigration Family Unit Project , and Benjamin Prado, long time community filmer with American Friends Service Committee San Diego. For Spanish interpretation you’ll need to register on zoom. 

This resource was a true labor of love, time, and passion for the potential of community filmers and lawyers to better work together in order to support immigrant rights. We extend our deepest gratitude to the following individuals and organizations. The knowledge you shared with us and your feedback have been invaluable: 

Yasmine Chahkar Farhang, Richard Bailey, Genia Blaser, Golnaz Fakhimi, Eva Bitran, Jodi Ziesemer, Andrew Wachtenheim, Yasmin Sokkar Harker, Ellen Pachnanda, Meghan McCarthy, Sarah Deri Oshiro, Mitra Ebadolahi, Liz Kenney, Adriana Piñon, Alexandra Smith, Margaret Garrett, Sarika Saxena, Brooklyn Defender Services, Immigrant Defense Project, the creative brilliance and guidance of the WITNESS U.S. Program team, Palika Makam & Jackie Zammuto, and the tremendous vision of Kelly Matheson of WITNESS, who conceived of the original Video as Evidence guide for the international human rights legal context! It takes a village.

We would also like to thank Brooklyn Defender Services, the American Civil Liberties Union, Media Tank, and Variant Strategies for so generously giving us permission to use beautiful stills from their powerful animated video series, We Have Rights. And Gregory Buissereth for the stunning illustrations.

GitHub Rejects Challenge on Tool used to Preserve Videos of Abuses

(New York, November 25, 2020) – A decision by GitHub, a leading software development platform, to reinstate a popular free software tool for downloading videos, means that human rights groups will be able to continue to use the software without interruption to preserve documentation of human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch, Mnemonic, and WITNESS said today. GitHub had removed the code for the software, youtube-dl, from its platform in response to a request by the Recording Industry Association of America Inc (RIAA).

youtube-dl is one of the primary tools used to download videos from hundreds of websites, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The tool is maintained and updated on GitHub. Videos posted online are essential for human rights investigations and research to expose human rights violations and provide evidence in legal proceedings to hold human rights violators accountable, including in international tribunals.

GitHub did the right thing in reinstating youtube-dl, following a spurious copyright claim, the organizations said. It is a vital tool for preserving and archiving documentation of human rights abuses to preserve evidence that can bring the abusers to justice.

On October 23, the Recording Industry Association of America submitted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request to GitHub to remove all public code repositories of youtube-dl, which essentially constitute the code behind the tool. This request would have left the youtube-dl developers without a key platform to coordinate with other developers working on the open-source tool. These requests are legal notices sent to online service providers that ask them to remove material that allegedly infringes on copyright.

Microsoft-owned GitHub complied with the request a few days later. On November 16, GitHub reversed course and reinstated youtube-dl to its platform, saying that it did so after it “received additional information about the project” that enabled it to reverse its decision.

While there is a possibility that youtube-dl might be used to download copyrighted material like Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off video and other videos mentioned in the request, the Recording Industry Association of America did not provide evidence that this had happened. Instead, it contended that youtube-dl should be removed for use by anyone for any purpose.

During the weeks youtube-dl was removed from GitHub’s platform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and youtube-dl provided GitHub with information on the legitimate uses of the tool, including “changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos.”

The code behind youtube-dl is used by dozens of other archival tools and browser plug-ins. Given how important it is across platforms, the attempted removal of youtube-dl from GitHub threatened to do serious damage, the groups said. GitHub is used by the small group of programmers and external contributors behind youtube-dl to help manage the constant updates needed to keep up with the way social media platforms and other websites update their services.

As a recent Human Right Watch report “Video Unavailable” notes, the ability to download, archive, and preserve videos documenting human rights abuses is crucial for human rights work because that potential evidence can be removed by the uploader or by the platform where it was published at any moment, especially as commercial platforms like YouTube prohibit graphic violence on their platforms.

The removal of this tool would seriously hamper a key form of evidence gathering. Social media platforms themselves have acknowledged the problem of losing human rights documentation when they remove content and have encouraged groups to archive videos.

“We use youtube-dl to archive and preserve videos related to human rights violations at the highest resolution available,” said Nicole Martin, associate director of archives and digital systems at Human Rights Watch. “Losing the ability to download and preserve content would be disastrous to efforts to hold abusers accountable.”

The archival and human rights group Mnemonic has used youtube-dl to preserve over two million videos from Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. In its own evaluations it has found a substantial portion of these videos would most likely disappear without the ability to archive them.

“Mnemonic’s most recent review of our archived videos from the Syrian conflict revealed that 23 percent of videos in collections of verified human rights documentation are no longer available on YouTube,” said Dia Kayyali, associate advocacy director at Mnemonic. “Without youtube-dl, that content could have been lost forever.”

People rely on social media platforms as the primary way they access the internet and share information throughout the world. “youtube-dl is essential in the accessible and transparent workflows we employ with our local partners to collect and preserve documentation for human rights advocacy and legal evidence,” said Yvonne Ng, archives program manager at WITNESS.

This free tool enables people to retrieve information and have it accessible offline, especially in low-bandwidth situations or when the internet has been shut down, the groups said.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s request was based on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the “anti-circumvention” rule, which prohibits bypassing, removing, or revealing defects in “technical protection measures” that control not just use but also access to copyrighted works. These protection measures control activities as disparate as who can fix cars and tractors, who can audit the security of medical implants, and who can refill a printer cartridge.

The rule has been applied in ways that hamper public interest archiving by libraries and other institutions, since copyright holders allege that these activities constitute circumventing the technical protection measures to infringe on copyright. The EFF has argued, and GitHub agreed, that its use in the youtube-dl case was a misapplication of the law.

Human Rights Watch contacted the Recording Industry Association of America, GitHub, and youtube-dl for comment. The association did not respond, and youtube-dl declined to comment on the events due to the ongoing legal case. However, youtube-dl did note the importance of GitHub as a platform and explained the origins of its tool. A spokesperson from GitHub said in a November 12 email to Human Rights Watch, prior to the tool’s reinstatement, that “GitHub believes that, as applied to source code, Section 1201 is outdated and too broad, often sweeping up code that has otherwise lawful purposes, but we are nonetheless required to comply with the law.”

The association’s attempt to use Section 1201 this way raises concerns about future efforts to misuse the law to restrict access to the internet’s archival tools that human rights organizations rely on, the organizations said.

GitHub announced new measures to address similar situations in the future. It said it plans to change how it evaluates requests under Section 1201, and to establish and donate US$1 million to a developer defense fund to support open-source developers on GitHub from unwarranted Section 1201 takedown claims. It also said it is advocating changing the copyright law’s anti-circumvention provisions.

This case points to a larger problem of flaws in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the organizations said. The law gives copyright holders very broad powers to impede the use of tools even for legal applications that are in the public interest, like preserving evidence of human rights crimes.

Elsewhere, Human Rights Watch has also warned that abusive takedowns for alleged copyright violations under other Digital Millennium Copyright Act provisions can become a powerful tool for silencing criticism and commentary online.

The provisions in the copyright law are outdated and overbroad, the organizations said. Policymakers need to ensure copyright laws don’t improperly restrict rights or eliminate key sources of evidence to hold rights abusers and war criminals accountable.

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For more on WITNESS’s work on archives, technology, and human rights, please visit:
http://archiving.witness.org/ and https://technology.witness.org/

For more information, please contact:
In New York, for Human Rights Watch, Deborah Brown (English): +1-347-920-8978; or brownd@hrw.org. Twitter: @deblebrown
In New York, for Human Rights Watch, Nicole Martin (English): martinn@hrw.org. Twitter: @av_archivist
In Berlin, for Mnemonic, Dia Kayyali: dia@mnemonic.org. Twitter: @DiaKayyali
In Prague, for WITNESS, Yvonne Ng: yvonne@witness.org. Twitter: @ng_yvonne

Join us on Tuesday, November 20, from 3-5 p.m. for a special training on how to use video as evidence in court to fight for indigenous rights.

This training is part of the World Indigenous Law Conference that brings together lawyers, judges, academics, Knowledge Keepers, policy experts, community leadership, community advocates, and students to talk about the implementation of Indigenous Law into western contemporary legal systems and highlight Indigenous Laws that already exist in Indigenous communities and Nations.

The training will take place at the Waterfront Ballroom at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

For more on our Video as Evidence work, click here.

Justice has triumphed in Bukavu, where two commanders of the rebel militia called Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have received life sentences for murder and torture, both constituting crimes against humanity, as well as pillage and arson. All 100 victims party to the proceedings have been awarded reparations ranging from 5,000 USD to 25,000 USD.

In 2012, the villages of Kamananga and Lumenje (South Kivu) were the theatre of barbarous attacks by the FDLR. Alleging the villagers’ support to a rival local militia, militiamen led by commanders Gilbert Ndayambaje (alias Rafiki Castro) and Evariste Nizeimana (alias Kizito) looted both villages, killed and tortured civilians and burned buildings to the ground.

Read more about the case

“We are delighted with this verdict,” says Daniele Perissi, Head of the DRC program at TRIAL International. “Impunity in DRC is rampant, including among armed groups’ commanders. This sends a strong warning signal to anyone committing abuses who might think their military power places them above the law.”

Videos are shown as evidence for the first time in DRC

This success is the result of a close cooperation between many actors, among which three NGOs: TRIAL International, whose mandate is to fight impunity for international crimes; WITNESS, which specializes in the use of video to defend human rights; and eyeWitness to Atrocities, which has developed a unique tool to record, file and verify videos used in judiciary proceedings. Together, they assisted the victims’ lawyers in collecting the strongest incriminating evidence, including verified video footage and photos – a first in the Congolese judiciary.

Isabelle Myabe, Program Manager at WITNESS, explains: “As part of the investigative process, we trained lawyers working on the case in the best practices of capturing and preserving video as evidence. During a fact-finding mission in July 2017, one of the lawyers documented evidence of mass graves in the targeted villages. An extract of this video was presented in the trial.”

In order to be admissible in court, the collected material had to go through a rigorous verification procedure, to ensure there had not been any tampering.

“During the investigatory missions, information was collected with the eyeWitness app to strengthen the evidentiary value of the footage presented in court”, says Wendy Betts, Project Director at eyewitness to Atrocities. “The app allows photos and video to be captured with information that can firstly verify when and where the footage was taken, and secondly can confirm that the footage was not altered. The transmission protocols and secure server system set up by eyeWitness creates a chain of custody that allows this information to be presented in court.”

Learn more about the use of audiovisual as evidence

“The atmosphere in court switched dramatically”

On the base of the collected evidence, TRIAL International assisted the victims’ lawyers to build their legal strategy.

“When the footage was shown, the atmosphere in the hearing chamber switched dramatically” testifies Guy Mushiata, DRC human rights coordinator for TRIAL International. “Images are a powerful tool to convey the crimes’ brutality and the level of violence the victims have suffered.”

TRIAL International, eyeWitness to Atrocities and WITNESS hope that this double condemnation will prompt other lawyers to use audiovisual evidence in criminal proceedings. They will continue to collaborate to help disseminate this practice in Eastern DRC.

Image credit: Augustin Safari Macumu/TRIAL International

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WITNESS makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. 

TRIAL International’s on this case has been conducted in the framework of the Task Force for International Criminal Justice, an informal network of international actors collaborating to support the work of Congolese military jurisdictions in the investigation and prosecution of mass crimes in DRC.  

The work of TRIAL International on mass crimes cases in DRC would not be possible without the support of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and the Belgian Development Cooperation.

Media contacts

TRIAL International
Noémi Manco, Communications Officer (In Switzerland, French and English)
n.manco@trialinternational.org
+41 79 192 37 44

Guy Mushiata, Human Rights Coordinator (In DRC, French and Swahili)
g.mushiata@trialinternational.org
+243 81 085 80 47

eyeWitness to Atrocities
Nyangala Zolho, Communications Coordinator (In UK, English)
Nyangala.Zolho@int-bar.org
+44 33 00 240 789

WITNESS
Isabelle Mbaye, Program Manager (In Spain, French and English)
isabelle@witness.org
+1 646 249 4992

For WITNESS, Libby will be developing the Video as Evidence Program’s guidance on using video to support justice and accountability for sexual violence crimes. She’ll work with our partners, peers, and other experts in this field as we continue to update and expand our available resources.

Libby is currently pursuing her JD at Columbia Law School while focusing on human rights and international criminal law. At CLS, Libby is a student participant in the Human Rights Clinic as well as Co-President of the Society for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (SIRR).

Libby earned her B.A in French and International Relations from Tufts University. There she received highest honors and the Ivan Galantic Special Achievement in Humanities Prize for her thesis on photographic evidence of the visible impacts of war crimes on the human body and analysis of how the construction and distribution of these images impact global understandings of mass atrocities.

WITNESS and El Grito de Sunset Park studied over 300 videos from El Grito’s collection of eyewitness videos depicting police misconduct and abuse spanning a dozen years. Sunset Park is a largely Latinx and Asian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Going beyond headline-grabbing instances of police violence, “Profiling the Police” aims to expose the day-to-day pressure, surveillance and harassment that residents in heavily-policed neighborhoods—most often people of color—like Sunset Park face on a regular basis.  

We set out to address specific challenges that El Grito faced in managing and making use of their collection of media. But we knew that these and other challenges are faced by many police accountability groups around the United States and the world. Additional problems we explored: supporting sustainable, community-led archives and preservation of police abuse accounts;  working towards metadata standards that would make it easier for video collections to be compared datasets in advocacy and reporting.

Lastly, civil rights law in New York and other states make it extremely difficult to access police officer personnel records for reports of misconduct or disciplinary action. While the burden of exposing abuse should not disproportionally rest on communities directly affected by it, collections like those held by El Grito are an important part of bringing greater transparency around misconduct. 

“Profiling the Police” would not have been possible without the support of our advisors which include:

• Benetech
• Berkeley Copwatch
• Digital Verification Corps.
• Dignity and Power Now!
• El Grito de Sunset Park
• Engine Room
• Human Rights Analysis Group (HRDAG)
• HURIDOCS
• Interference Archive
• Invisible Institute
• Karen Stevenson, Metropolitan Interactive
• Legal Aid Society
• Lucy Parsons Labs
• Open Police Complaints
• Robin Koning, Archivist
• Robin Margolis, Audiovisual Archivist
• Security Force Monitor
• Syrian Archive

For more on the project, click here.

It doesn’t feel like long ago that the first shaky videos of the Arab Spring were uploaded to the Internet.

First it was young Tunisians—protesting for the rights of young men like 26 year old Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire when he was arrested for selling fruit, the only way he was able to make a living to support his family. A few days later, Egyptians began sharing images of Khalid Said–a young man who died in police custody in Alexandria, when police tortured him to death for being in possession of video evidence that implicated the police in a drug deal. The video showed evidence of corruption; the images, of the brutal torture that the regime was capable of. Both inspired a movement that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty year rule and a new dawn for Egypt.

Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria quickly followed suit. Young people filming demonstrations on their smartphones—and then sharing them on social media as a call to action—became so ubiquitous that terms like “Facebook protests” and “Twitter revolutions” were thrown about to characterize the technology-savvy uprisings.

But soon this form of documentation started to play another role. As the regimes cracked down on the protests, many of the activists turned their cameras towards the security forces, documenting the tear gas, beatings and bullets that were injuring, and killing their comrades. Like the images of Khalid Said’s maimed body, the viral videos that once catalyzed the revolutions were no longer just about demanding change; they were also demanding accountability.

Seven years later, it is difficult to remember the optimism that once galvanized a movement across the region. The death of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has left behind a political vacuum that devolved into militia-governed chaos. Egyptians—who originated the “Facebook protests” now face Internet surveillance and censorship so extreme that many are wary of communicating—much less, organizing—using online platforms. Yemen and Syria’s uprisings became full-scale wars.

Still, the importance of documentation remains constant. Syrian activists who have spent the past seven years documenting the regime’s crackdown on their demonstrations—and then the barrel bombs, chemical weapons attacks and massacres that came after—are now being approached by international media outlets and human rights organizations to see if their videos can be part of an effort to support investigations, advocacy, and eventually even hold war criminals accountable.

But it isn’t only the activists who are using video. Governments have used video to discredit activists—such as the Egyptian court that showed a video of Egyptian activist Ala’a Abdel-Fateh’s wife belly-dancing in their home, to indict him on charges of participating in civilian clashes in front of the Shura Council building during protests in 2013. Extremist groups such as the so-called Islamic State uploaded countless videos of their own group, beheading civilians and pillaging ancient artifacts from Syria.

As a result, we are overwhelmed with video footage—on YouTube there are more hours of documentation of the Syrian conflict than of the Syrian conflict itself. It got so extreme that YouTube tried to flag, and in some cases, remove, the often violent content—a policy that many activists, including our partners, Syrian Archive, fought. Legal systems around the world have been largely under-equipped to handle the influx of footage made possible by today’s mobile technologies; and, simultaneously, the power of citizen witnesses to capture video for social change and evidence remains largely unrealized.

In an effort to strategize effective ways to use video evidence as a tool to defend and advance the public interest, PILnet and WITNESS organized a training on how to make use of such resources in legal proceedings. The training took place in Morocco in December 2015, bringing together human rights advocates from across MENA. While participants recognized the value of video evidence, many of them were unfamiliar with the question of how different jurisdictions can use video evidence in their respective legal settings.

Our goal is that the Video as Evidence Field Guide (available in Arabic), and the Video as Evidence in the Middle East & North Africa report—released in collaboration with PILnet—will bridge existing gaps so that citizens, activists, and lawyers can better work together in using video for justice.

Read this in Arabic. 

Cover photo: © Mustafa Karali, 2017

Featured image: MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images

“Eyes in the Sky: Drones at Standing Rock and the Next Frontier of Human Rights Video,” a new report published today by the WITNESS Media Lab, examines how activists and journalists used drones to document the protests by Native American tribes and other advocates against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. Based on extensive research and interviews with drone pilots who operated at Standing Rock and drone experts, the report surveys the benefits, challenges and legal concerns associated with unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as providing tips and further resources.  

Until relatively recently, drones were most commonly associated with targeted killings or surveillance. As technology and regulatory policies have evolved to make them more accessible, drones and their recording capabilities have been broadly adopted across a number of industries. But Standing Rock may be the most wide-ranging example yet of activists and journalists using drones for documentation, storytelling and advocacy purposes. Their successes, as well as the many obstacles they encountered, offer broad lessons for social movements and journalists around the globe who look to add drones to their toolkit going forward.   

In many ways, Standing Rock offered the ideal environment in which to experiment with drones. From a visual and logistical standpoint, the vast, unpopulated North Dakota plains were optimal for the sweeping aerial shots drones excel at and allowed the community to see what was happening on land where they were not allowed to step foot. Footage that showed the proximity of the pipeline’s drill pad to the Missouri River and the tribe’s water source, for example, provided compelling visual evidence for a central advocacy issue. But while many environmental groups have used drones to document land and nature issues, the most innovative use of drones at Standing Rock may have been to record clashes with the police from above.

Much as the proliferation of mobile phone cameras has shifted the debate on police abuse on the ground, at Standing Rock, the drone operators documented chaotic confrontations between law enforcement and activists from the skies. Using Facebook Live and other livestreaming technologies,  journalists such as Myron Dewey of the indigenous media platform Digital Smoke Signals instantaneously distributed footage to thousands of viewers that provided convincing counter-evidence to law enforcement’s version of the clashes. In tandem with on the ground cameras and eyewitness testimony, the drones’ wide-angle, aerial vantage point repeatedly served as a powerful evidentiary tool for reconstructing events.

The successes of and challenges faced by the Standing Rock drone pilots offers important lessons as drones increasingly become part of the documentation toolkit.

Check out our new report!

“Eyes in the Sky: Drones at Standing Rock and the Next Frontier of Human Rights Video”

Featured Image: Still from Standing Rock drone footage by Myron Dewey.