Sarrah Hammerl
Legal Research Fellow
In Part II of this series, I analysed the OTP´s Policy on cyber-enabled crimes to examine how digitalisation changes what forms of conduct can constitute or facilitate international crimes, and how responsibility can be attributed under the Rome Statute. Building on this, the following post will investigate how participation in the justice processes linked to such crimes is transformed by digitalisation. Concretely, it looks at how violent events become digitally documented and potentially transformed into evidence, focusing on who participates and in what capacity.
It starts with the most direct form of participation, namely people documenting and reporting on violent events, increasingly using smartphones, specialised apps, and electronic submission platforms. The post then moves from recording to interpreting and verifying such content. Citizens no longer merely participate as witnesses, but as investigators who geolocate materials, compare sources, reconstruct events, and identify perpetrators or locations.
The post then expands the notion of participation beyond the people directly involved in documentation and investigations to reflect on the larger audience of the justice process, including those who follow livestreams, watch trial recordings, or otherwise participate in discussions on the proceedings in digitally mediated publics. The post ends by pointing out the politics of digital participation since digitalisation decentralises access points to justice as much as it creates new hierarchies of visibility and expertise.
From Witnesses to Digital Evidence: Decentralizing Documentation
In conflict zones and authoritarian regimes, where on-the-ground access is often restricted, the Specialised apps like eyeWitness to Atrocities enable ordinary citizens to capture footage with embedded metadata such as the date, time, and location of a recording, ensuring it meets the legal standards required for court admissibility.
OTPLink, the electronic submission platform of the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Court (ICC), allows victims, witnesses, and CSOs to submit digital material directly. Similarly, the Ukrainian government quickly provided a range of digital tools that enabled citizens to share information in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These included the e-Enemy chatbot, which allowed users to report Russian troop movements, as well as a website, which reportedly received over 10,000 submissions within the first two months of the conflict.
‘Citizen journalism’ and ‘citizen investigations’ have risen . . . often with the goal of challenging dominant, state-led narratives or highlighting underreported issues linked to serious human rights violations.
To process the vast amount of information that becomes available into evidence and to coordinate cooperation across different organisations and countries, investigators also increasingly rely on digital tools. Within the ICC´s Project Harmony, cloud computing and machine learning tools help investigators to swiftly review and organise incoming information linked to potential criminal conduct. As a result, we see an increasing integration of digitally derived evidence into both international and domestic criminal proceedings dealing with mass violence crimes.
Online users across the globe have come to participate in investigations by verifying and structuring digital content, using open- and closed-source data. ‘Citizen journalism’ and ‘citizen investigations’ have risen as terms referring to citizen-led practices of capturing, investigating, and reporting content, often with the goal of challenging dominant, state-led narratives or highlighting underreported issues linked to serious human rights violations. In particular, in the context of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), organisations such as Bellingcat and Amnesty International have used citizens’ engagement to crowdsource their investigations, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers worldwide.
Networked Publics and the Expansion of Witnessing
The aforementioned digital technologies have decentralised the generation and collection of evidence, allowing for multiple actors in various locations to participate in accountability processes. This creates digital spaces in which events linked to international crimes are documented and reported, and subsequently analysed, and acted upon on a global scale.
Furthermore, video recordings, livestreaming, and the documentation of trial hearings make judicial proceedings more accessible and transparent to a global audience. This allows the global public to not only observe violence but also legal testimony remotely, creating ‘networked publics‘ connected by digital platforms.
At the same time, heightened publicity necessitates enhanced security considerations and protective measures for all persons involved, including witnesses, perpetrators, victims, and their family members. Filming atrocities or sharing geolocated evidence may expose witnesses to retaliation, while those who review graphic digital content face a significant risk of traumatisation.
The Unequal Politics of Digital Participation
While digitalisation has increased the means to document and report on ongoing human rights violations, this is not the case for victims and witnesses with limited access to high-speed internet or digital devices. Furthermore, accessing justice requires significant resources to cover the high costs of digital infrastructure and litigation, which are major barriers to equal participation for victims and grassroots organisations.
Moreover, geopolitics, sanctions, and data biases easily create a reliance on incomplete or skewed data. This might create evidentiary divides, where suffering in regions with limited visibility and connectivity may remain internationally illegible, leading to the underrepresentation of certain victims’ experiences in justice processes.
In conflict zones and authoritarian regimes, where on-the-ground access is often restricted, the widespread ownership of electronic mobile devices and use of social media allows a multiplicity of actors to provide near real-time documentation and reporting of atrocities.
At the same time, information is filtered through respective legal standards, institutional priorities, and cultural understandings. From this perspective, accountability mechanisms for human rights violations operate at the intersection of locally situated experiences and global legal frameworks, with data generated via electronic submission platforms, citizen journalism, or crowdsourcing not merely transmitted but transformed as it enters legal systems.
As digital traces and AI-generated analyses require expert translation into legally meaningful facts, some also point to the risk that authority shifts away from local oral testimony toward remote open-source investigators, diaspora tech collectives, and technical experts who interpret digital evidence.
Moreover, in its recently published briefing note, the Victims’ Rights Working Group (VRWG) points out that the heightened involvement of affected communities also underscores the need for a survivor-centred, culturally sensitive approach, reflected in the interactions between court staff and members of the public attending proceedings.
The Transformation of Agency
This blog post took a closer look at how information about international crimes comes into existence and enters processes of accountability, and examined in what ways digital technologies contribute to—or complicate—these processes.
On the one hand, digitalisation broadens participation in accountability processes beyond traditional state and legal actors. Victims and witnesses can now document and share evidence through smartphones, dedicated applications, and online platforms, and electronic submission systems such as OTPLink. Crowdsourced investigations enable geographically dispersed civil society actors and journalists to contribute directly to fact-finding. Moreover, livestreamed hearings and digitally available reporting allow global audiences to follow proceedings remotely. Participation therefore becomes more decentralised and transnational, while also increasingly mediated through digital infrastructures and technical interpretation.
This creates digital spaces in which events linked to international crimes are documented and reported, and subsequently analysed, and acted upon on a global scale.
At the same time, digitalisation creates new forms of vulnerability associated with the production, circulation, and consumption of digital evidence. Sharing geolocated images or videos may expose victims and witnesses to retaliation, while repeated exposure to graphic digital material can lead to traumatisation among survivors and investigators.
These developments suggest that victimisation extends beyond the original atrocity to include harms arising from digital documentation and participation in accountability processes. They also reinforce the need for survivor-centred and culturally sensitive approaches that recognise these digital harms.
Moreover, digitalisation shape not only how harm is documented but also whose experiences become visible and legally recognised. Because evidence increasingly depends on digital traces, connectivity, and technological infrastructures, victims whose experiences are poorly digitally documented or originate from digitally marginalised regions risk becoming underrepresented in accountability processes, creating an ‘evidentiary divide‘.
At the same time, authority to define and interpret such harm increasingly shifts toward open-source investigators, diaspora technology communities, and technical experts who translate digital evidence into legally meaningful facts. This may marginalise survivors’ oral testimony and detach legal narratives from the social and cultural contexts in which the harm was experienced.
In sum, digitalisation expands participation while simultaneously redistributing power over who is visible, credible, and authoritative. While new forms of digital harm do not necessarily require new laws, they cannot be addressed by legal rules alone either. Instead, they require new and enhanced institutional capacities, partnerships, and accountability infrastructures. The next and final part of this series is thus concerned with digitalisation and its impact on institutional relations within the wider justice ecosystem.
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