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

The Check Project has worked to build online tools, support independent journalists, and develop media literacy training resources that aim to improve the investigative quality of citizen journalism and help limit the rapid spread of rumors and misinformation online.

Our MENA Sr. Program Coordinator Raja Althaibani will speak on a panel with our partners at Syrian Archive  along with Bellingcat and Meedan. This panel will be followed by a workshop covering:

• Un/ Framing Syria : Citizen content and conflict mediation in the digital age
• Experiences from the field: Using Video for Change in the MENA
• Archiving the Syrian War
• Fact-checking video narrative of conflict: Analyzing airstrikes in Syria and Iraq

CheckCon’s free, public Unconference takes place on Saturday, April 22nd. Register here.

For more information on the conference and to view the full 2017 program, click here.

As part of a larger, international effort to secure more support for female Syrian and Palestinian refugees— populations that are highly vulnerable to sexual violence— WITNESS partnered with Oxfam and ABAAD on a three-day training in Beirut that focused on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) advocacy and education.

The training was led by WITNESS’ Senior Program Manager for the Middle East/North Africa, Bukeni Waruzi. The 20 participants learned more about the laws surrounding GBV in Lebanon, and how to safely and ethically document sexual violence on camera in order to advocate for support, systemic change, and justice when those laws are violated.

“Thanks to the great coordination of ABAAD, the training went very well,” said Bukeni of his time in Beirut. “Participants were able to identify practices of sexual violence including forced marriage, sexual harassment… Some of these practices are the result of war-driven poverty in the refugee settlements, and other practices have exponentially increased, such as forced marriage”.

Throughout the training Bukeni used WITNESS’ resources, including our guide to “Conducting Safe, Effective and Ethical Interviews with Survivors of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.” This helped provide a comprehensive understanding of how to ethically and effectively document GBV, and enabled discussion around how these resources could be used according to the specific needs of the participants. The trainees will take the skills and knowledge acquired at this training back to their respective communities in order to train others on GBV advocacy.

“I feel like I’ve gained a lot in these few days of the training. I know many things now and how I could use my own story to advocate for peace and to address the situation” —Syrian trainee.

Bukeni leads WITNESS’ global effort to combat Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, supporting activists to create effective strategies to fight for gender justice through video and other technologies. More about WITNESS’ work on GBV and our advocacy resources can be found here, and in our recently launched digital library.