When videos of police firing teargas at protestors start doing the rounds online, most viewers react with concern or horror. But for human rights investigators and defenders such as Amnesty International, these videos are just the beginning of a much deeper investigation.

Given the advent of fake news, fake videos and huge quantities of online reports, investigators must continuously question if the content is real. To seek answers, Amnesty set up the Digital Verification Corps (DVC) through which academics, world-renowned experts and student leaders from human rights centres around the globe, including HKU, are developing innovative approaches to human rights research and investigations.

A key aspect of that work involves digging deep into online content to find hard evidence of human rights abuses. Recently, HKU students have been trained in gathering evidence from such sources as open-source media, user-generated content, social media sites, and court and government websites.

HKU Law lecturer Lindsay Ernst has coordinated the effort with Amnesty as part of her undergraduate ’Human Rights in Practice’ course, where students examine such issues as the use of user-generated content in international criminal tribunals and courts and the ethics involved in gathering evidence for human rights investigations. Her students work on the DVC investigations outside class time and other students are welcome to help them.

“Students in the DVC must think beyond a reading list. They have to take ownership to investigate and discover the material – for example, evidence of instances of teargas in Baghdad on a given day – and develop critical questions about the data. Is the evidence strong enough to stand up in a tribunal? Which tribunal? Should evidence have any less rigour just because it’s being reported in the media?” Ms Ernst said.

“At times, the evidence does not stand up. It can be frustrating for the students, but pedagogically it’s valuable because they learn to challenge assumptions and question what they are reading and seeing.”

​ Students in the Digital Verification Corps must think beyond a reading list. They have to take ownership to investigate and discover the material – for example, evidence of instances of teargas in Baghdad on a given day – and develop critical questions about the data.

Ms Lindsay Ernst

‘There might not be answers’

The first DVC training was held in January 2018 led by Sam Dubberley of Amnesty. The students subsequently started investigating a 2014 chemical attack in Kafr Zita in Syria and police brutality in a 2017 protest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

For the Syria attack, they compared footage, researched hospital interiors, read NGO reports and reviewed landscapes to pinpoint which hospitals were impacted by the attack. For the DRC project, they found videos online and were able to identify police brutality and the locations and weapons that appeared in the videos. Their findings contributed to a larger Amnesty report.

Areon Chan Yee-tak, a recent BSocSc(Government and Laws) & LLB graduate and currently PCLL student, was involved in the research. “What struck me was that there might not be the answers out there that students are used to. We could spend hours on a video that does not lead anywhere. This realisation prompted me to change my mindset so that I persevere in my research approach.”

The students also had to figure out how to handle incomplete materials and to systematically deal with massive numbers of open-source videos, said Year-5 BBA(Law) & LLB student, Mathilda Kwong Yuan-shang. For example, for the Syria attack they sifted through many similar videos of hospital interiors to determine which hospitals they were looking at. Google satellites did not help because most of the buildings no longer exist, so they had to turn to other sources and reports.

“My most important takeaway is that information is flowing more quickly and there are more risks of manipulation. We must always be aware of critically analysing the information we obtain. We cannot just accept something because we believe it to be true,” she said.

Skills for the digital age

Moving forward, the Faculty of Law is ramping up its human rights investigations. Two international scholars have been recruited to help develop projects with the DVC and Ms Ernst, while the LLM programme has launched three of its own projects. These include working with an NGO in the Philippines to map remote areas so human rights abuses can be investigated and humanitarian organisations can identify areas of need; investigating human trafficking with the NGO Liberty Shared; and probing enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka.

HKU will host the annual DVC Summit in June. Students from all DVC-participating universities in the US, UK, Canada and South Africa, as well as staff from Amnesty, will attend. One of the students helping to organise the Summit, Yuki Lok Chi-yu, Year-5 BSocSc(Government and Laws) & LLB student, found the lessons from the DVC training could apply to anyone in the digital age.

“Learning digital methodologies, including open-source research and investigation, is helpful in verifying the authenticity of information and data circulating on social media platforms. Promoting the wide use of these methods and skills could help reduce the spread of fake news and information,” she said.

INVESTIGATING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

Law students are working with Amnesty International and other organisations to investigate human rights abuses in such places as Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, using open-source intelligence and digital technology.

Summit participants attending an expert speaker’s sharing session.

At the ‘Verification-athon’, students collaborate across universities to verify content for a given potential human rights violation.

Sam Dubberley (first from right), Manager of the Digital Verification Corps (DVC) presenting certificates to the HKU DVC team members on the last day of the training.

Ms Lindsay Ernst (centre) and the HKU Digital Verification Corps team members at the University of

Cambridge.