FILM IT |
Film and document human rights violations. |
FILM IT. PRESERVE IT. PRESENT IT.
About Video as Evidence
PRESERVE IT |
Manage your footage and ensure it can be found. |
PRESENT IT |
Present your footage to investigators, lawyers and the justice system. |
Case Study
Learn about the role video played in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s case against Slavko Dokmanović for crimes against humanity.
WITNESS’ Video as Evidence Program is an important part of a collaborative, international effort to pioneer a set of practices around the use of video to increase accountability, justice and human rights for all people.
Our work in this field began over a decade ago with the publication of our Video for Change book, and today Video as Evidence is a key component of our Critical Response work on police brutality in Brazil and human rights violations in the Middle East; The Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video, and our secure camera apps, ObscuraCam and InformaCam.
This work has received ongoing, positive reception from – and partnership with – the international human rights and criminal justice community.
As mobile phones and social media become primary tools to document human rights abuses, there is an increasing flood of videos that human rights groups hope will function to support criminal investigations and proceedings.
Resources
WITNESS is producing a Video as Evidence “Field Guide” Series.
Initial sections for lawyers, activists and human rights defenders can be downloaded here.
More thoughts and ideas about Video as Evidence can be found on the WITNESS Blog.
Unfortunately, many of these videos seldom pass the higher bar needed to be used as evidence in a court of law.
Videos can be persuasive evidence of human rights violations, but the volume, often anonymous or pseudonymous nature of citizen media, and lack of easy corroborating data make it difficult for this material to have concrete evidentiary value. In a recent review of thousands of citizen videos, attorneys concluded that very few met even basic evidentiary standards for admissibility.
It is our belief, however, that if we train activists and citizen witnesses to capture video with enhanced evidentiary and documentation value, and develop and share tools that help authenticate videos and push for their incorporation into mainstream tools and platforms, international human rights and criminal justice stakeholders will be able to better leverage this important citizen media.
Key Questions
Alongside traditional manual forensic techniques of verification, more technology-driven initiatives are underway to help improve verification and the digital chain-of-custody of footage. This, it is hoped, will legitimize the use of footage in legal, media and archival contexts.
Yet key questions arise: How can authentication concerns be incorporated into the media capture and collection process, as well as into online distribution channels? Can video files carry better authenticatable data? How can the process of verification be shared among networks of users or social media network participants? How can data be better archived and managed by a greater range of organizations? How can evidence be better identified and located via open-source discovery in online environments such as YouTube? How can the volume of video available be used to benefit human rights activists, instead of creating significant challenges of evaluation, authentication and management?
FROM CAMERA |
Citizens document human rights abuse. |
TO INVESTIGATORS & LAWYERS |
And work with NGO’s, Investigators and Lawyers. |
TO COURTROOM |
To present relevant and reliable evidence to courts. |
Video as Evidence Resources
WITNESS is creating resources to help human rights defenders increase the evidentiary value of their videos. Our Video as Evidence Field Guide provides basic and advanced practices to move video from capture to the courtroom to help maximize the utility and impact of video evidence.
Through the presentation of legal theory, case studies and how-to instruction on filming and archiving, the series presents concrete strategies and workflows for individuals interested in using video for change.
While our work on this is ongoing, we are releasing sections as they become available.