Expert Roundtable:

Civil Society Documentation

Use of Digital Evidence in International Courts

Event Description

International courts are increasingly being faced with questions on how to evaluate admissibility and weight of digital evidence of atrocity crimes collected by mechanism investigators and civil society documenters. How do chain of custody requirements have to evolve to accommodate new ways of collecting data? Why should they evolve? Furthermore, what is the value of digital databases and why do documenters all over the world increasingly rely on digital data collection tools for their work? Our experts discussed these pertinent issues facing the international legal community as they explored the benefits and challenges that digital data collection presents to international courts.

This event was part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.

This event marked Part I of PILPG’s 2022 Civil Society Documentation Roundtable Series. Part II, which will take place on February 11, will focus on the subject of Civil Society Documentation: Privacy and Security Obligations for Documenters. We will discuss how documenters that use digital databases to store digital information protect the sensitive details that victims and witnesses provide to them. Further, how do these obligations differ when using a digital database in place of paper questionnaires, and do the benefits of using these technologies outweigh the additional responsibilities that come with them?

Event ReCORDING

SpeakerS

**Kate Gibson**
Kate Gibson is an Australian lawyer specializing in international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights law. She has been appearing before the international criminal courts and tribunals since 2005, in cases involving genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Kate is currently the co-counsel of Bosco Ntaganda before the International Criminal Court. Between 2009 and 2018, she represented Jean-Pierre Bemba, former Vice-President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who was acquitted of all charges by the ICC Appeals Chamber in June 2018. She is leading the legal team of Paul Rusesabagina, charged with terrorism before domestic courts in Rwanda, and is part of the defence team of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.
In July 2018, she was appointed as Legal Consultant to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council in A/HRC/RES/34/22 on 3 April 2017, and currently represents a group of Rohingya survivors in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Previously, she appeared as counsel for accused before the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, including as Lead Counsel to Minister Justin Mugenzi who was acquitted of all charges in 2013, Legal Assistant of General Gratien Kabiligi who was acquitted of all charges in 2008, and co-counsel of Radovan Karadžić, the former President of the Republika Srpška. She was also co-counsel to former Liberian President Charles Taylor before the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Kate represented victims in the first case before the Extraordinary Chambers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Between 2007 and 2008, she was the Associate Legal Officer to Judge Mohamed Shahabuddeen in the Appeals Chamber of the United Nations Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
She holds an appointment as a Senior Legal Advisor with the Public International Law and Policy Group in Washington, D.C., and as a Senior Consultant with the International Development Law Organisation in Rome, Italy. Kate holds an LL.M (First) in International Law from Cambridge University. She is published and teaches in international criminal law and transitional justice, and works in English and French. She lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

**Bethany Houghton**
Bethany Houghton is a lecturer and researcher at the Vrije (Free) Universiteit Amsterdam. She previously studied law at the University of Durham in the UK and pursued post-graduate law studies in Transnational Legal Studies and Legal Theory at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam, graduating cum laude. Bethany also serves as Assistant Counsel at the Public International Law & Policy Group where she works on human rights documentation solutions. For the Netherlands Office of PILPG, she is a project coordinator of the Virtual Human Rights Lawyer, a tool that uses technology to address the access to justice gap in relation to international human rights law.

**Glenn Gibson**
Glenn Gibson is an associate advising on complex litigation and arbitration matters. She is a member of Baker McKenzie's Litigation & Government Enforcement Practice Group in Toronto.
Glenn has a diverse civil litigation and arbitration practice with clients in the consumer goods, energy and mining, and transportation sectors. She is regularly engaged in specialized contract disputes and all manner of commercial matters, including negligence, misrepresentation, fraud, economic torts and shareholder rights disputes.
She has acted in multi-jurisdictional class proceedings involving allegations of anti-competitive activity and securities misrepresentations. Glenn works with Baker McKenzie's global team in executing cross-border legal strategies, including defence of concurrent class proceedings.
Glenn sits as a member of the board of directors of Young Canada Arbitration Practitioners. She has represented clients in international and domestic arbitrations.
Glenn is a frequent contributor to canadianfraudlaw.com, globalarbitrationnews.com, and the Baker McKenzie International Arbitration and Litigation Newsletter.

**Raquel Vazquez Llorente**

Raquel Vázquez Llorente is the Permanent Representative of FIDH to the International Criminal Court, and FIDH’s Head of Delegation in The Hague. Before FIDH, Raquel helped set up eyeWitness, an organisation that has developed award-winning technology to verify and authenticate digital photo and video evidence. Raquel's work focuses on how technology can facilitate survivor-centred justice, and she has contributed to the documentation and investigation of core international crimes in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. She’s a lawyer admitted to the Madrid Bar (Spain), and a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the ICC and of the Justice Rapid Response Roster for the deployment of experts to complex investigations. She’s held visiting research positions on technology and digital evidence at Oxford University and at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law (2019-20). She’s also part of the inaugural class of the Obama Foundation European Leaders programme (2020-21).

MODERATOR

Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Managing Director at PILPG is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.