Human Rights Center continues work with the International Criminal Court
Professor Stover welcoming participants to the workshop A three-day workshop on cyber investigations in co-operation with the Human Rights Center is underway at Salzburg Global.
The
Human Rights Center at University of California, Berkeley School of Law has organized three intensive workshops to take place in 2013 and 2014 entitled the Salzburg Workshops on Improving War Crimes Investigations.
This particular session will include participants from the
International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors, technology innovators, and non-governmental organizations.
One aim of the workshops is to discuss and formulate new partnerships and protocols for documenting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in court-admissible ways.
Workshops have also been designed to facilitate and encourage discussions on the use of technology, particularly cyber information, to strengthen war crimes investigations.
Program co-chair Eric Stover is the faculty director of the Human Rights Center and professor in the school of law.
Professor Stover explained to Salzburg Global that the session would work with the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor to help look at ways to improve their capacity to collect and assess digital evidence.
“The way we define digital evidence is information that’s contained digitally on cell telephones, mobiles, videos, [and] computers.
“What’s happened over the last year has been a push to improve the capacity of the prosecutor’s office to conduct scientific investigations.”
Professor Stover said with any criminal investigation taking place in the world, three types of evidence were sought for: testimonial, physical, and documentary.
“Documentary evidence can be minutes from meetings, telephone intercepts, written orders, or information gleaned from cellular devices. The aim is triangulate such evidence with testimonial and physical evidenced obtained at the crime scene.”
However, coordinating these three types of evident can present a challenge in itself. Prof. Stover highlighted three arrest warrants issued by the ICC during the Libyan conflict in 2011.
“During the Libya conflict, a number of people on the street or elsewhere were sending to the court video clips, memory sticks and things of this sort.
“You can get bombarded with this. How do you organize it, analyse and then decide what is its probative value?”
The session being held at Salzburg Global will bring a number of experts from around the world who will meet and discuss challenges of digital access and gathering evidence.
Prof. Stover said: “We’re always in a race against technology. In recent years, more and more of this information is in the cloud, and that lays out a whole new set of challenges of how you access that information.”
Formal and national judicial procedures need to be followed in order to collect and analyze this data.
Prof. Stover suggested the ICC was beginning to set out a plan of action to meet these challenges.
It marks the Human Rights Center’s second workshop with the ICC. The first workshop was held at The Hague last year, which brought together the Office of the Prosecutor, investigators and forensic institutes to discuss how to improve scientific investigations, including the use of DNA analysis, remote sensing, and social media.
Prof. Stover said: “This workshop, like the past workshop, is not only [about] presentations by experts on the use of accessing and analysing this bit of evidence.
“It’s also to try to act as a connective tissue in the way to get the prosecution to meet new people and experts, so they can pursue these connections after the workshop.”
The Human Rights Center conduits research on war crimes and other serious violations of humanitarian law and human rights worldwide. The center supports efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to protect vulnerable populations using evidence-based methods and innovative technologies.
Prof. Stover hopes the session will bring about a clearer articulation of the Office of the Prosecutor’s needs and how to resolve issues affecting the ICC’s work, including the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (2002).
He said: “We’re looking for ways in which the Act that act might be amended to better enable the court to get access to service providers and for the US government and private companies to be able to assist the court.”
Prof. Stover returns to Salzburg Global for his fourth visit, having previously attended sessions to help design a curriculum on international humanitarian law for journalists.
He said: “Ironically, given the topic of our workshop, what I like about Salzburg is that our participants can escape from the digital world, turn off their devices and actually talk to one another and understand issues more deeply.
“That’s what’s wonderful about being here: the quiet, the possibility for people to meet after the workshop itself and converse over dinner. “I think in these times it’s a nice place to go to get away from the buzz of the world.”
