Join WITNESS Senior Program Manager Priscila Neri and a panel of experts on October 18 in New York City as they lead a seminar to provide a toolkit so that beginners can learn, and video experts can brush up on, what’s involved. It will offer technology tips and provide links to useful tools; discuss how video journalism differs from print, including ethical responsibilities; and show the power of video in changing the narrative.

Other panelists include:

Erica Anderson, Erica Anderson, lead for U.S. partnerships with News Lab at Google. She will talk about the tools that Google provides to verify the authenticity of videos that journalists use from third parties.

Sara Obeidat, a co-producer at Rain Media working on films for FRONTLINE, including Inside Yemen, Separated and The Pension Gamble, which will be coming out in October. She also is the Enterprise Fellow at FRONTLINE.

The moderator will be OPC Secretary Paula Dwyer of Bloomberg News.

You can RSVP here.

Getting Real is a biennial conference on documentary media. The three-day conference attracts over 800 participants and is the only gathering of its kind in North America. Palika participated in a panel titled, Journalists Under Threat and spoke about best practices for being safe while reporting on critical human rights abuses.

Today, Palika will be moderating a panel titled, Duty of Care – Protecting Vulnerable Sources, which will focus on protecting sources who report on human rights abuses from the frontlines.

You can follow Palika on Twitter here.

As the executive director of a human rights organization and a member of a global community of activists, you have to regularly ask yourself an existential question: why do we exist? At WITNESS, our raison d’être is our belief that when human rights defenders can use video and technology safely, ethically and effectively, more human rights change will happen.  We believe that there are millions of us who could be defenders as we now can use the technology at our fingertips to create a just world: together, our stories, our truths, can create accountability for human rights crimes and mobilize a just society. This is very personal to me because it is why I get out of bed in the morning. But on a practical level, that existential question should underpin, on a daily basis, everything we do in the struggle for human rights.

This is why last December we brought our entire staff- from Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, The Netherlands, and Senegal- to join their U.S.-based colleagues in Brooklyn, NY for our Global Team retreat. And the purpose of our existence was the question that simmered –brightly!- right below the surface as we took a critical look at the state of human rights in the world, questioned our priorities, took in feedback, analyzed our successes, anticipated our future challenges, and evaluated our partnerships and our methodologies.

In the fight for human rights, there are no guarantees of success, but in our 25 years in this fight, we have honed and fire-proofed our approach. In reviewing this past year, we celebrated successes with our partners and identified where we could do better.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made as collaborators in the growing networks of resistance around the world, building capacity with activists to use video and technology effectively to defend their rights.  We (both WITNESS and our partners) saw stronger ‘ecosystems’ of activism emerge in a tumultuous human rights landscape. For example, an indigenous community in southern Mexico used video documentation and technologies that helped them win an important victory against abusive extractive industries with illegal mining permits.

We also saw how our ‘long bets’ worked: carefully planned, strategic steps against seemingly insurmountable systemic injustices and crimes have born fruit and created real cracks in the walls of impunity vulnerable communities endured this year. For example a groundbreaking investigation into police misconduct and extrajudicial killings in Brazil.

We noted the growing reach and use of our tailored, timely guidance, tools,  and resources, enabling communities to speak out more safely, document human rights crimes in ways that can be verified and trusted, and use video as a strategic tool to push for changes and accountability. For example, across the Asia Pacific region, acts of discrimination that target indigenous peoples and minority populations are on the rise. Based on input from partners, we produced a video with tips for filming acts of hate which was viewed more than 35,000 times via our Asia Facebook page.

Our strategies are anchored in deep collaborations, coupled with the strength and resourcefulness to respond to expected and unexpected challenges. These were the seeds for progress and impact that were planted along the way.

We also looked, critically and with feedback loops from our partners, at where we (as WITNESS or collectively) could have done better, worked smarter, could have been more focused or strategic.

One of our observations is that the phrase ‘tireless activist’ is a misnomer. We and our partner communities get tired, suffer setbacks, and face new challenges that were in no one’s plans – all the time. The mistake we make, over and over, is that, as human rights activists, in the face of mounting crises and phenomenal enemies, we don’t stop often enough to assess, take a breath, and adapt.  

Last year, in particular, the human rights movement was under constant attack. More defenders were killed in 2017 than any year before. Populism, repression, ethnic cleansing, blatant disregard for rule of law, were only some of the successive challenges we encountered. This work comes at a high cost to activists and brave communities who resist. We are in a crisis, but to be as effective as possible, we need to operate outside of crisis-mode.

The world is never going to be predictable, but we’ve built the capability to stop and assess into our plan for the coming year. Because, for example, when the WITNESS team paused, briefly, to discuss our learnings, something wonderful happened during our retreat: we realized how similar the needs on the ground were in one region to others and how we could adapt and share solutions hatched in one place to other places where communities faced similar challenges. For example, our work with partners in Syria dealing with large volumes of human rights documentation that they aim to turn into concrete impact informed updated guidance we’ve shared on crucial cataloging and archiving strategies with activists in Brazil, the United States and beyond.

As millions of people turn to their mobile phones and social media to share their stories of abuse, sometimes putting themselves at great harm, we see repeat patterns of the challenges they face. Building on what we are learning with our partners, we are devising ever-smarter ways to get solutions, tools, and guidance, urgently into the hands of the many, many communities around the world who are facing similar roadblocks to justice. And we’re taking their needs to the tech giants to advocate for system-wide solutions that can turn millions into safer and effective defenders.

To do this, we need to pace ourselves, be radical listeners to our partners and the landscape, and take the time to understand what we are seeing and learning. Then, we can act nimbly, practically, and effectively – to address the challenges and risks defenders face in creating impact.  For example, with more people telling their stories on video, which can be accessed by perpetrators of the abuse, we’re pushing for functionalities that protect people’s identities.  And we’re helping to remove the barriers that activists face such as ensuring their content can be preserved, trusted and found in an environment rife with misinformation.  

And when we come together in shared, networked advocacy efforts, and spend the time to compare and coordinate our efforts, like the groups we work with on exposing and addressing violations committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the United States, powerful alliances are built and our chances of success increase.

To do our work well, we must pause to listen, learn and adapt. That is, admittedly, hard to do in a world that requires immediate responses to violations of rights, a world where hatred and violence can move and spread quickly and easily and do more harm than ever.

In 2018, WITNESS is committed to partnering with marginalized and vulnerable communities, and building capacity for people to use video and technology to put an end to injustice.  And from time to time, this year, no matter how deep the crisis or how urgent the need, we will take a moment to listen, to learn and to ensure that our efforts and those of our partners will be more impactful than ever.

WITNESS’ partnership with Coletivo Papo Reto began in 2014. Upon learning that communities on the frontlines of police violence in Brazil were embracing the potential of video and social media to speak out—and at great personal risk—WITNESS’ Latin America team offered resources surrounding safety and security. In collaboration with WITNESS’ representatives in Brazil (Senior Program Manager Priscila Neri and Brazil Program Coordinator Victor Ribeiro), Papo Reto also pulls together teams of allies including activists, public defenders, and lawyers, to critically consider how to use visual documentation for advocacy, protection, and evidence.

At our weekly staff meeting, WITNESS staff, partners, and allies gathered to hear Papo Reto co-founders Raull and Renata speak about life in Complexo do Alemão, as well the collective’s process, challenges, and accomplishments fighting impunity in the favelas. The media is littered with stories depicting Raull and Renata’s community as one plagued by drug trafficking and violence, reinforcing a mainstream narrative that fails to account for the full experience of those who live in the community. Raull described the “war on drugs” and legal systems as racist tools of containment and control over poor communities in Brazil. As an example, he invoked the case of Eduardo de Jesus, a ten-year-old boy who was fatally shot in the head in 2015 by a police officer who supposedly mistook his phone for a gun as he played on his front stoop.

In the aftermath of Eduardo’s murder, Papo Reto was the first on the scene and quickly began filming and taking photographs to preserve critical evidence. Papo Reto’s presence and cameras prevented the police from tampering with the crime scene, a common tactic used to mask extrajudicial killings. Their involvement also initiated a forensic analysis of the scene, something Raull remembered as “the first forensic analysis of a killing in a favela that I’ve ever seen in my 28 years of living in Complexo do Alemão.”

Without Papo Reto’s visual documentation, certain victories would not have been possible: the preservation of the evidence and an in-depth investigation (rare), as well as the ultimate conclusion that Eduardo was indeed killed by police fire (even rarer). However, the officer was never brought to justice in the courts of law. Eduardo’s story speaks to the paradigm of police activity in Rio; officers are rarely held accountable for their actions, and the statistics citing frequency are shocking.

“In Brazil,” Renata informed the room, “one young black person is killed every 11 minutes.”*

“And the reality in Brazil is that a person is killed several times,” Raull explained. “First, they are killed by the actual bullet. Then, they are killed by the media narrative, which parrots the police version of events by describing that person as criminals and assassinating their reputation. And finally, they are killed by the legal systems that fail to hold perpetrators accountable.”

In the event of extrajudicial deaths like Eduardo’s, or the ongoing illegal invasions of private residences in Complexo do Alemão, Papo Reto both receives and produces documentation of violence, and uses it to publicly demonstrate the impact of these violations on the residents—with the ultimate goal of creating accountability and change. For the collective, mobile phones are “weapons of defense and protection.” Members burn through phones rapidly, filming continuously and tirelessly to capture the truth, often amassing a series of explicit and clear videos that can be used as evidence.

This summer, Papo Reto celebrated an important victory, when a collection of video footage was used as evidence in court to indict two high-level commanders for their responsibility in the unlawful invasion of private homes. This case is a significant success, considering the widespread impunity for abuses committed by police in favelas.

In contrast with the mainstream narrative of his community, Raull describes Complexo do Alemão as “a place with a lot of power and amazing ideas—a space of resistance for poor and black families,” who fight every day to combat the larger, very intentional, systems that seek to profit from the lives of marginalized residents. Raull and Renata are also quick to clarify that for them, “it’s not a choice to be an activist.” The violence faced by residents of Complexo do Alemão is a reality, and the documentation of that violence is a matter of daily survival.

“I am most scared of giving up and not fighting for a better tomorrow,” Renata explained, a sentiment that Raull echoed with resounding confidence: “I just need to know that you are with me, and for you to know that I am with you. I believe in that.”

Our session concluded with Renata asking all in attendance to please share the following message: “Stop killing our youth – the extermination of black youth in Brazil needs to end.”

Follow Coletivo Papo Reto on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

*Officially, police were responsible for 920 killings in 2016 in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone, and post–Olympics, that number continues to rise; the number of police killings was 78% higher in the first two months of 2017 compared to the same period of 2016. However, as is also true in the United States, statistics tend to be unreliable. Reporting of extrajudicial killings by police end up masked as “deaths by resistance,” with terms like “stray bullets” used to deflect accountability. Activists believe that the actual number of people killed by police in Brazil is as high as four or five times the official count; in 2014, the BBC reported that the Brazilian police kill six people each day.

Featured image: Raull and Renata on the subway in New York City, September 2017.

Since late 2015, WITNESS and FiSahara have together leveraged online videos to support more effective reporting on Western Sahara – a territory that is nearly invisible to the outside world. The two organizations have trained at-risk Sahrawi media activists and human rights defenders on safe and effective documentation, and utilized the curation platform Checkdesk to curate, verify, and contextualize online reports.

Watching Western Sahara Silk compiles nearly 100 online videos recorded between December 2015 and June 2016, and allows users to view them within the context of larger stories of human rights in Western Sahara. In addition to other issues, these videos collectively expose a pattern of police intervention of peaceful protests, a large social movement calling for economic opportunities, ongoing demands for self-determination, and women-led demonstrations addressing the treatment of political prisoners. Click here to explore interactive reports and find videos based on location, time of recording, and other data points.   

The United Nations considers Western Sahara one of the world’s last “non-self-governing territories.” The Sahrawi population has lived under Moroccan rule for more than 40 years, despite a 1991 UN-brokered agreement to hold a referendum for self-determination. Due to strict limitations on the press, foreigners, and international human rights monitors, very rarely does footage or other reporting from the territory come to the attention of the international community.

More on this project and media activism in Western Sahara can be found here.

https://youtu.be/kAOt3R9l-QY&w=640&h=480

“Of the 56,000 homicides in Brazil every year, 30,000 are young people aged 15 to 29.That means that, at this very moment, a young person is most likely being killed in Brazil. By the time you go to bed, 82 will have died today. It’s like a small airplane full of young people crashing every two days, with no survivors. This would be shocking enough by itself, but it’s even more scandalous that 77 per cent of these young people are black.”

Check out this post or this New York Times Magazine feature on us to learn more about how we’re working to expose police violence in Brazil. We also co-authored to a report with partner organization Article 19 about how video can be better used for justice and accountability in Brazil. And here you can find a host of resources in Portuguese.

In our cameras everywhere world, the number of civilians using video to document abuses, war crimes, and more has grown exponentially. Citizen witnesses, not trained human rights investigators, are often first on the scene. However, while there is more video than ever, the quality of this footage rarely passes the bar needed to serve as evidence. WITNESS’ new guide is poised to change that. The Field Guide provides practical guidance, case studies, checklists and more to help activists and lawyers better collaborate, in turn, strengthening the likelihood that their videos can be used in court, for advocacy, and be trusted by the media.

The Field Guide draws on WITNESS’ nearly 25 years of supporting and training human rights advocates to use video to document abuse and as a tool for justice including at the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court. One of the biggest drivers in creating the guide was our experience supporting Syrian activists.

“While no conflict has been as thoroughly documented as the Syrian war, the footage many activists risk their lives to capture has not had the desired effect of prompting action to stop human rights abuses. Furthermore, they seek long-term justice and accountability,” said Kelly Matheson, Senior Attorney and Program Manager at WITNESS, and author of the Field Guide. And if last week’s verdict against Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic (he was on the run for 13 years and his trial took five) is any indication, Syria’s road to justice may be long.

The Video as Evidence Field Guide was written with universal principles at its core and is adaptable to global contexts whether in Syria, Brazil, the Central African Republic, the United States or beyond. Translations of the Guide are already underway in Arabic, French, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, with more planned.

The Video as Evidence Field Guide includes:

All About the Law: Basic legal principles and processes every activist should be familiar with;

• Basic Practices: How to safeguard, organize and manage your videos to ensure they can be accessed and used by investigators, attorneys and judges;
• Filming for Evidence:
  • Camera techniques for capturing video with enhanced evidentiary value;
  • Proving responsibility through linkage evidence
  • Filming Interviewing: Including an overview of informed consent
• Sharing and Verifying: Guidance on whether to post your video or not and if you decide to post, practices for posting human rights footage; ensuring a video you film or footage you find can be used as evidence;
• Case Studies From the Field: Stories illustrating how video has been used throughout the justice process and presented to courts;
• Mini Guides: Illustrated summaries for quick reference of many sections;
• And much more.

Download the guide for free here.

Watch a video teaser here and join the conversation online at #VideoAsEvidence.

Related Events:

29 March – DocuDays film festival in Kyiv, Ukraine – a training will be held for documentary filmmakers including an overview of the Field Guide.

Today – RightsCon in San Francisco – Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, WITNESS’ executive director discusses the Field Guide on a panel.

Today – Twitter chat with Women Under Siege, a project of the Women’s Media Center and Matisse Bustos-Hawkes of WITNESS from 2-3pm EDT. Join the conversation #VideoAsEvidence  @witnessorg @womenundrsiege and @matissebh.

2 April 2016 American Society of International Law annual meeting, Washington, D.C. – The Field Guide’s author Kelly Matheson speaks on panel about video as evidence.

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About WITNESS: WITNESS trains and supports activists and citizen witnesses around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose abuse and fight for human rights change. Since our founding in 1992, WITNESS has trained and partnered with thousands of people using video for change around the world.

Karen Stevenson, WML Curation Fellow

The WITNESS Media Lab Fellowship is a 15-week program designed to support the innovative curation of eyewitness video to support human rights documentation and advocacy. Karen’s winning proposal focuses on the distribution of eyewitness footage of violence toward transgender and gender non-conforming people. She plans to audit, index and contextualize online and social media channels that host and promote eyewitness videos of violent acts against these communities as entertainment. She will begin in mid-April.

Karen has previously served as BRIC Arts Media’s Co-Director of Community Media where she launched Brooklyn’s first 24×7 community cable channel that includes the borough’s only live, daily news show and several other Emmy-nominated programs. She has also served as Senior Director of Digital Media at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

She has founded several technology companies and co-founded a non-profit media institute that has trained journalists and media entrepreneurs in the U.S., Poland, Albania, Turkey, and the Pacific Islands. She’s been a digital media consultant to the American Chambers of Commerce to the European Union and was selected to be the Digital Media keynote speaker at their Annual Plenary Meetings in Warsaw and Istanbul.

The WITNESS Media Lab is dedicated to advancing the role of eyewitness video in human rights documentation and advocacy through innovative video curation as well as resource development and thought leadership.

Throughout the night we heard from inspiring artists and activists like Baltimore’s Kevin Moore, Black Violin, Sebu Simonian of Capital Cities, I Love Vinyl, Tai Beauchamp and Viacom President and CEO, Philippe Dauman – our 2015 See It. Film It. Change It. honoree. Citizen witness Kevin Moore brought the audience to their feet with his powerful story of documenting the arrest of Freddie Gray in a video that would lead to the indictment of six police officers and bring national attention to the issue of police violence. “We all have the power to stand up against what we know is not fair – and fight for what is just,” he said. “And by hitting record on your phone, you could change or even save a life.”

WITNESS’ Yvette Alberdingk Thijm inspired us with a look into the future as she explained how initiatives like WITNESS Media Lab are using new cutting edge technology to hold human rights perpetrators accountable for abuse. In a changing world, we know WITNESS will continue to bring about justice one video at a time.

The night concluded with a performance from Sebu Simonion of Capital Cities’ hit song, “Safe and Sound” ending the night on a note of optimism about the fight ahead.

Thanks to those who stood with us on November 12th – and who continue to stand up for a just world! We could not continue our mission to expose truth and defend human rights freedoms without your incredible support.

To experience this inspiring night through photos and video check our website and YouTube channel.

In collaboration with the News Lab at Google, and continuing the work of its predecessor, the Human Rights Channel on YouTube, the WITNESS Media Lab will address the challenges of finding, verifying, and contextualizing eyewitness videos for the purpose of creating lasting change.

The WITNESS Media Lab will focus on one issue for a few months at a time, using new tools, strategies and platforms for research, verification and contextualization of citizen video. We will share analysis and resources publicly online via case studies, blog articles, multimedia presentations and through in-person convenings with peers. The first project will look at several cases of eyewitness video of police violence in the United States.

“We’re incredibly encouraged by the growing capacity of people everywhere to capture video of human rights abuses in their communities. We’re also aware of the critical need for skills to harness the potential of those videos, in order to turn them into tools for justice,” said Madeleine Bair, Program Manager for the WITNESS Media Lab.

Drawing on more than two decades of supporting people to use video for human rights advocacy, the WITNESS Media Lab will leverage the organization’s in-house expertise as well as that of our extensive peer networks in the fields of advocacy, technology, and journalism. Together with them, the WITNESS Media Lab will seek to develop solutions to ensure that footage taken by average citizens can impact some of the world’s most pressing and persistent injustices.

“Videos depicting human rights abuses on YouTube can be an incredibly powerful tool to expose injustice, but context is critical to ensuring they have maximum impact,” said Steve Grove of the News Lab at Google. “We’re thrilled that WITNESS is bringing their deep expertise to this space in the WITNESS Media Lab, and we are honored to be partnering with them.”

For more details visit us at WITNESS Media Lab website and follow us @WITNESS_Lab. And YouTube published an announcement today detailing their support of the WITNESS Media Lab and a two other projects focused on the power of citizen video.

Press inquiries and requests for interviews should be directed to Matisse Bustos-Hawkes at WITNESS via our press kit or on Twitter @matissebh.

About the News Lab at Google

The News Lab at Google is the company’s effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Our mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to build the future of media with Google. We do this through a global outreach effort to empower technology-driven storytelling in newsrooms; a strong data journalism practice based on our Google Trends platform; and through unique partnerships that seek to increase access to quality information globally.