UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, or HRC, trained 10 Sudanese refugees to use digital tools to track potential war crimes and human rights violations.
The HRC partnered with the International Center for Transitional Justice, or ICTJ, to conduct the training, which took place Nov. 3-8 last year in Kampala, Uganda. The training occurred shortly after the Rapid Support Forces, Sudan’s paramilitary organization, engaged in a civil war against the military, allegedly killing 10,000 civilians in the city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region of Sudan.
“The crisis in Sudan is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster,” said Scott Straus, professor of political science at UC Berkeley. “This is a war that’s been going on for more than three years and has resulted in the displacement of millions of civilians. The U.N. has warned of hallmarks of genocide, which I think is accurate.”
The program trains participants to find and verify information using open-source investigative methods. Satellite imagery analysis, structured social media searches and reverse image searches can be used to analyze publicly available data, according to HRC trainer Maggie Andresen in an email.
The HRC has had a digital open-source investigations lab since 2016, and partnered with the U.N. in 2017 to create global standards for such investigations, according to Alexa Koenig, co-faculty director of the HRC. The HRC and ICTJ began leading global open-source investigation trainings together in 2023, according to Andresen.
“Often governments or military groups may argue that they didn’t do the crimes of which they’re being accused, so it could be really powerful evidence for communities to find the facts online,” Koenig said.
Participants are also trained to protect their own security and that of others as they obtain, store and transmit information during their investigations, according to Koenig. She noted that participants are taught to consider the potential consequences for individuals in countries they are investigating before sharing information with the public.
Koenig added that the HRC teaches participants to use techniques such as viewing content in gray scale with lowered audio and an altered playback speed to mitigate the potential psychological harm of an investigation.
The HRC invited graduates of former trainings in Yemen, Libya and Tunisia to co-facilitate the training in Sudan, according to the HRC website.
“Our team is thinking through how we can now create hubs of excellence throughout the world, where people can adopt and adapt some of the skills that we traditionally train … for (the) appropriate context in their communities,” Koenig said. “Ideally, we no longer are the primary trainers since we can’t possibly reach all of the communities that are interested in this work.”