New assets (12/20)

Peter ten Hove
13 januari 2021

This month:

  • Bayanat as a powerful open source data management solution
  • Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations
  • Conflict Related Sexual Violence
  • Documentary “Cases of Evil: Vlasenica”
  • EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime
  • Sanctions Explorer

Bayanat

On 8 December 2020 the Syria Justice and Accountability Center shared the code of their relational database. As they stated:

“Social media data has the power to hold human rights violators accountable and to help victims’ families identify their loved ones. Likewise, the advent of the citizen-journalist has strengthened human rights documentation. However, organizations’ and individuals’ limited resources, government suppression, and social media algorithms threaten the essential preservation of this data. To address this gap, the Syria Justice Accountability Centre’s (SJAC) designed a relational database software in 2014 to download, label, process, and analyze large data sets of digital evidence. After six years of using this database internally, SJAC performed a major upgrade to create our new open-source software, Bayanat, or “data” in Arabic. Bayanat empowers human rights groups to preserve and process large amounts of data. After being beta-tested by data management teams and select partners, Bayanat is now available for download free of charge”.

Some highlights:

  • Bayanat employs the industry’s best practices and security features;
  • it allows human rights documenters to safely preserve, analyze, and share data of human rights abuses for advocacy, prosecutorial, and journalistic purposes;
  • events, actors, and labels can be cataloged and linked to specific IHL violations or investigations;
  • with a keystroke, organizations can identify the most relevant information and track violations of a single perpetrator.

Berkeley Protocol

On 1 December 2020 the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, together with its partners, organised the online event ‘Nuremberg at 75: Launching the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and the Future of Visual Evidence in International Accountability’.

While the event commemorated the first use of film as evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, it provided a platform to discuss the future of digital evidence to foster accountability for violations of international criminal, humanitarian and human rights law. It then launched the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, A Practical Guide on the Effective Use of Digital Open Source Information in Investigating Violations of International Criminal, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.

The Protocol is a new tool for strengthening the use of video and other digital information as evidence in human rights, war crimes and international criminal cases. The Protocol was written based on extensive research and many workshops and consultations.

Conflict related sexual violence

International humanitarian law (IHL) prohibits all forms of sexual violence in situations of armed conflict. Sexual violence is also prohibited by other bodies of international law, including international human rights law (IHRL) and international criminal law (ICL).

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has published a checklist that supports the domestic implementation of IHL rules prohibiting sexual violence. It sets out the applicable provisions, as well as a selection of other sources of law and policy that may inform domestic frameworks governing sexual violence. It can be used by legal experts in their discussions with government authorities and by states when reviewing their own law and policies.

The checklist is intended as a good-practice guide to developing legislation that addresses sexual violence in armed conflict.

Documentary Cases of Evil

On 14 December 2020, the documentary “Cases of Evil Vlasenica” was released. It has been produced by the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) and PINCH Media for the Srebrenica Memorial Center’s video archive.

The documentary addresses the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – ICTY’s case, ‘’The Prosecutor v. Dragan Nikolic,’’ and notorious war crimes that took place in the Bosnian city of Vlasenica, including the establishment of the Sušica concentration camp. Through stories of victims and survivors, including survivors of sexual violence, the documentary aims to preserve the memory of these horrific crimes, educate about its legacy, and highlight the everyday struggle of survivors and returnees for justice and recognition.

EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime

On 7 December 2020, the EU adopted its global human rights sanctions regime . It applies to acts such as genocide, crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations or abuses (e.g. torture, slavery, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests or detentions). While other human rights violations or abuses may also fall under the scope of the sanctions regime where those violations or abuses are widespread, systematic or are otherwise of serious concern.  

This regime provides a framework that allows the EU to:

  • target individuals, entities and bodies –  including state and non-state actors –
  • responsible for, involved in or associated with serious human rights violations and abuses worldwide
  • no matter where they occurred.

The restrictive measures under the framework might provide for:

  • a travel ban
  • freezing of funds
  • persons and entities in the EU may be confronted with a prohibition to make funds available to those listed.

Sanctions Explorer

Sanctions are a crucial part of the way that the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and various other nations and organizations protect national and international interests and ensure peace and security. The EU Sanctions Map is a fine tool to use. However, the website Sanctions Explorer aims to provide a comprehensive overview of all current and historical sanctions data across all major sanctioning authorities. It does so, by addressing key challenges in the current state of art, such as:

  • limitations on accessing and exploiting hard data;
  • the existing online interfaces;
  • difficulties in search opportunities;
  • the functionality;
  • the lack of historical sanctions information;
  • lack of opportunities to compare separate datasets due to different spellings and formats.