The battle for Tripoli started in April 2019 when the commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, began its campaign to take western Libya.  Civilians and their homes have been indiscriminately targeted by both the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Libyan National Army (LNA). In the three months following the LNA’s attack on Tripoli, a devastating human rights crisis has unfurled – including more than 100 civilians and more than 100,000 displaced.

Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps (DVC) was set up in 2016 to address three main challenges. 

Our Digital Verification Corps – a global collaboration between Amnesty International and six universities – was named ‘International Collaboration of the Year’ at the Times Higher Education Awards in London on November 28th, along with the University of Essex’s Digital Verification Unit.  The judges said they were “incredibly impressed with the nature of the partnership, how it led to an impressive network of student investigators, and how it has delivered and continues to deliver data-driven evidence that can be used to prosecute war crimes and support society-building and social justice”.

The Evidence Lab is Amnesty International’s digital investigations team, working to advance digital methods in human rights investigations. We tackle complex research challenges and explore innovative investigative methods to document human rights violations worldwide.  

This blog post is written by Dominique Lewis, who co-led this project at the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigation Lab on the Digital Verification Corps team. Dominique reports on the various methods and techniques that her team members used while investigating these human rights violations.

Amnesty International has found evidence of Egyptian security forces using French-supplied Sherpas and MIDS vehicles to violently crush dissent in the country between 2012 and 2015. Part of this research involved Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps – a network of volunteers trained in social media verification based at universities around the world. DVC members at the University of California, Berkeley and the Universiy of Toronto analysed over 20 hours of video footage and several hundred photos of events in the country. The audiovisual material that the DVC teams verified formed an integral part of Amnesty International’s report – Egypt: How French arms were used to crush dissent – that outlines these findings.

This online space aims to support human rights organisations, researchers, investigators, students, journalists and others to explore and share digital investigative methods for human rights research.

Among the half-million hours of video uploaded to YouTube on March 20, 2017, was a disturbing 18-second clip showing a gunman executing three people — bound and facing a wall — on a dusty street, purportedly in Benghazi, Libya.

On April 14th 2017, a shooting occurred at the Manus Island Detention Centre in Papua New Guinea, where over 800 refugees and asylum seeker are detained by the Australian government. There were media reports that shots had been fired into the Centre — endangering the lives of those detained there. Manus Province police commissioner David Yapu didn’t agree. “The soldiers fired several gunshots on the air causing great fear and threats to the local and international community serving at the centre” he said, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting.