The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations is Launched

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, when prosecutors used film as evidence for the first time in international criminal prosecutions, having set an evidentiary cornerstone in the foundation of justice, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights launched the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations.

Following a three-year period of extensive research, workshops, and consultations involving over 150 experts from across the world, the Protocol is to lay forward common global standards for using public digital information, including photographs, videos, and other information posted to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as evidence in investigating violations of international criminal, human rights and humanitarian law.

As a repository of human rights collections including user-generated sources such as anonymized interviews (Information Items), amateur photographs, and raw footage, Blinken OSA welcomes the publication of this groundbreaking Protocol, which will come in handy when analyzing these historical records. It will also inform our teaching activities, which, for a few years now, have included the verification of open-source evidence of human rights violations