Sam Dubberley
managing director Digital Investigations Lab Human Rights Watch
Manisha Ganguly
visual investigations lead The Guardian
Megha Rajagopalan
international correspondent The New York Times
Nick Waters
open-source analyst Bellingcat
News organisations have struggled to report accurately on the Israel-Gaza war due to a host of challenges. International reporters are not allowed to report from the ground. Local journalists are being killed in record numbers by Israel’s military campaign. Misinformation is constantly posted on social media by public officials and partisan sources, and filtering through public discourse. But open-source reporting techniques have aided reporting of violations in active conflict zones.
This panel is an exploration of war crimes investigations and grave human rights abuses that have been exposed remotely using open source intelligence, and the permissibility of this information in prosecutions at the International Criminal Court and other bodies. We will discuss real-life examples of investigations we’ve conducted in the Israel-Gaza war, the Syrian civil war, the invasion of Ukraine and China’s vast network of incarceration of Uyghur Muslims – the evidence for all of which was gathered using a combination of open source techniques and used to corroborate ground realities – in a bid to push for international accountability and justice.
