Ubiquitous witnesses: who creates the evidence and the live(d) experience of human rights violations?

Abstract

Contemporary human rights activism and witnessing includes a range of new participants. Their practice operates at the intersection of established and emerging forms of documentation and advocacy. Questions about the roles of ‘citizen witnesses’ and ‘citizen investigators’ parallel concerns in the news-gathering world around ‘citizen journalists’. Two poles of the current paradigm of citizen witnessing manifest how existing professional norms and activist practices are being disrupted. Citizens act as first-hand responders on the scene of human rights violations, documenting for potential evidentiary value. As the volume of videos from a context like Syria depicting potential war crimes reaches half a million, questions arise as to how this citizen documentation relates to current and historical paradigms of human rights and justice documentation. In another context, on-the-scene witnesses in locations such as Brazil livestream video from the sites of violations to others who are co-present, watching those livestreams from other locations as ‘distant witnesses’. Using examples and documented practices from Syria, Brazil as well as the emergent methods of media collectives and human rights groups such as WITNESS, this paper explores the characteristics of these witnessing contexts, how they relate to established ideas of witnessing and human rights practice, and the emergent ‘pain points’ that create tension with those existing norms. Finally, the paper develops a set of speculations on the practical possibilities of a more meaningful image and experience-based solidarity activism at the intersection of trends in live and immersive video, ‘co-presence’ technologies for shared experience at a distance, and task-routing technologies that make use of distributed movements. The paper concludes with the ethical questions around this type of vicarious experience.

Keywords:

• human rights
• witnessing
• video
• co-presence
• citizen journalism
• evidence
• livestreaming

Acknowledgements

Within this paper I draw on the experience of WITNESS, the human rights group that aims to support millions to safely, ethically, and effectively use video for human rights. I also draw on research done while a visiting fellow on the future of human rights activism at the Institute for the Future. The initial discussion of the case of Ahmad Biasi draws on previously published work in Gregory and Losh (2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sam Gregory helps people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create human rights change. As the Program Director of WITNESS (www.witness.org), he supports millions of people to use video for human rights; he also teaches on human rights and participatory media at the Harvard Kennedy School. Sam launched the Webby and Shorty nominated Human Rights Channel on YouTube, leads WITNESS work on the award-winning ObscuraCam and InformaCam tools and helped co-found the global Video4Change network. In 2015, he launched the ‘Mobil-Eyes Us’ initiative focused on combining the experience of live video with the power of on-demand APIs to drive more meaningful and useful global activism. He has worked on impactful campaigns worldwide and created a range of training programmes and teaching texts, including acting as lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press, 2005). He has spoken widely at venues including the White House, SXSW, the Amnesty Global Activism meeting and TEDxEast, and has published in the Journal of Human Rights Practice, American Anthropologist, FiberCulture and First Monday. Sam was a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident on the future of video-based advocacy, 2012 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and in 2013 a ‘Future for Good’ Fellow at the Institute for the Future, working on the future of activism. Sam has an MA in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, attending as a Kennedy Memorial Scholar, and has a BA from the University of Oxford. [emails: [email protected]; [email protected]]