WITNESS + US State Department panel, March 18

On Wednesday, March 18 at 9am EDT/-4 GMT, WITNESS and the US State Department are co-hosting the panel: “State of Rights: Citizen Witnesses Documenting Human Rights.” The discussion will center on the increasing role of non-state actors who report on human rights abuses and how that information is used to pursue justice. It will highlight the innovative work that citizens, community media collectives, NGOs and non-traditional journalists are doing to expose human rights abuse internationally.

The panelists’ discussion will include questions such as:

• How can citizen media to move beyond raising awareness of issues to using it for justice including, in some cases, legal evidence.
• What can be done to combat the trend of falsified or recycled video?
• How can today’s technology enable people to more thoroughly authenticate their video, making it more trustworthy?

The conversation will also address some of the ethical questions related to citizen media:

• Where and when should human rights abuse media be shown publicly and who decides?
• What measures can be taken to better prevent this and better protect victims’ identities before sharing media online?

Participants in the Google+ Hangout Discussion will include:

• Madeleine Bair – Program Manager of the Human Rights Channel at WITNESS. Follow her on Twitter @madbair and @ythumanrights
• Christoph Koettl – Advisor, Crisis Response at Amnesty International. Follow him on Twitter @ckoettl
• Irene Herrera – Venezuelan filmmaker, journalist, Assistant Professor at Temple University Japan, and co-founder of Video Venezuela. Follow her on Twitter @herrera_irene
• Moderated by: Dan Mahanty – Senior Advisor for Office of Security and Human Rights in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. Follow him on Twitter @danmahanty

The discussion can be viewed live online via Google+ Hangout here. You can also join the conversation by tweeting @witnessorg or any of the participants using #stateofrights and #video4change.

** UPDATE: Here are some recap materials following the panel

Watch the discussion in its entirety here.

Check out the online discussion and questions from the event on Storify here.