War crime

• In the city of Nanjing, China, the Memorial Hall for the victims in Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese Army stands as a solemn monument on the site where the atrocity occurred.
• The "Wailing Wall" in the memorial is a shared tombstone for the 300,000 victims of the massacre.
• On December 13, 1937, after the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, in violation of international conventions, the Japanese military brutally massacred unarmed civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers.
• Since 2014, December 13 has been legistated as the National Memorial Day for the Victims in Nanjing Massacre.

• The International Criminal Court – an international tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands, designed to investigate and prosecute war crimes – is trying to keep pace with this trend.
• The ICC, a common acronym for the court, issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023.
• The ICC’s current investigation in Ukraine could further cement this shift toward using digital evidence to investigate war crimes – and raises new challenges about verifying the authenticity of these photos and videos.

A rise in digital forensics

• War crimes investigations have traditionally relied almost exclusively on witness testimony and mud and bones forensics from crime scenes.
• Prosecutors ultimately had such a large trove of video evidence that they organized them into a digital visual platform.
• Satellite imagery, mobile phone videos and other sources of digital data can offer powerful supplements to eyewitness accounts of war crimes.

Is it real or fake?

• With the rise of advanced video editing and artificial intelligence tools, it can be challenging to tell real videos or images from fake ones.
• If investigators are unable to guarantee that the evidence they download is real, they are unable to proceed with their work.
• This guide, known as the Berkeley Protocol, sets standards for legal relevance, security and the handling of digital evidence.
• This includes guidance for investigators, such as protecting the identity of witnesses who provide digital evidence and awareness of the psychological effects of viewing disturbing content.

The digital evidence so far for Ukraine

• For now, they are safe by staying within Russia’s borders, since Russia does not abide by the ICC’s arrest warrants or prosecutions.
• But the court’s investigation of Russian war crimes is ongoing, and it will rely on the thick trail of digital evidence that journalists, regular citizens and even perpetrators themselves have documented over the course of the Ukraine war.
• Two research agencies that previously consulted for the ICC have also released their own visual investigations of war crimes in Ukraine, showing digital evidence that Russian artillery attacked a theater in Mariupol where civilians took shelter in March 2022, for example.

• On March 16 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it had recorded 859 attacks on healthcare facilities in Ukraine.
• Russian attacks on civilians and the most vulnerable targets, including maternity hospitals, have been a feature of the conflict from its beginning.
• In research published in The Journal of Human Rights, I presented evidence that tends to corroborate Tedros’s statement.

Collateral deaths

• As well as deaths due to the actual fighting, there are many other causes of death during a war.
• These include increased exposure to disease, food shortages, and civilians’ lack of access to medicines and medical care.
• Attacks on healthcare facilities and infrastructure place greater demands on governments that are having to switch funding from healthcare provision to defence.
• I found that civil wars are associated with an average increase in the infant mortality rate of 5.2% the following year.

It doesn’t end with ceasefire

• The country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and was almost immediately embroiled in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict against Armenia, which lasted until 1994.
• By May 1994, when the signing of the Bishkek Protocol brought a (temporary) end to hostilities, the IMR had increased to 75.3 per 1,000.
• I made the same comparison involving countries that had spent their whole time as independent states involved in civil war.
• These war-torn societies, on average, experienced an 11.5% increase in their IMRs (from 62.5 to 69.7).
• By the last year of the major civil war in 1994, the rate had jumped to 200.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, a 22.6% increase.

War crimes

• But the terrible consequences of all war for people – not least, the infants that have been the subject of my research – should remind all those involved in conflict that they must adhere to the Geneva Conventions, or face the consequences of committing war crimes.
• It’s hard to imagine war crimes more heinous than those committed against infant children who have not yet reached their first birthday.

• WASHINGTON, March 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- War crimes, if left unrecognized and unpunished, only lead to more aggression and suffering.
• There is no better time to reiterate that than today, as we see millions of people- women and children face death and destitution.
• Not only have the crimes not been recognized, but many of the war-criminals went on to become powerful generals and administrators in Pakistan, influencing decision-making even today.
• Prominent genocide prevention watchdogs like Genocide Watch and Lemkin Institute have already recognized what occurred in Bangladesh in 1971 as genocide.