How to document war crimes in the digital age
The stories coming out of Bucha, a small city near Kyiv that was under Russian occupation since early March, are horrific. Witnesses have described scenes of torture, summary executions and mass graves. Journalists who accompanied Ukrainian troops moving into the city have reported seeing civilian corpses along the road, some with their hands tied behind their backs, others with a gun blow to the head.
This adds to the growing pile of evidence that Russian troops have perpetrated war crimes in Ukraine. On April 4, President Biden called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be brought to trial. The European Union created a Joint Investigation Team with Ukraine that will collect and process evidence that can be brought before the International Criminal Court.
“Perpetrators of war crimes will be held accountable,” tweeted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday.
Human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are collecting evidence. And across the NGO and legal advocacy community, there’s an army of people working to authenticate videos of attacks through open-source investigation, also known as OSINT, by using publicly available data to show where and when videos were shot and photos were taken.