Expert Roundtable:

Civil Society Documentation

Privacy and Security Obligations for Documenters

Event Description

In our previous Civil Society Documentation Roundtable Series event, we discussed using technology for documentation and how it is used and analyzed by courts for accountability purposes, exploring the relationship between documenters and the information they collect being used in international courts. During this roundtable, co-sponsored by Orrick, we discussed 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? We gathered an expert panel to share documenters’ legal responsibilities that come with using digital databases, and of documenters and tool developers who work with these technologies on a regular basis. We hoped to answer, Who owns the data? Where is it stored? How is it protected? Is it still worth using?

This event is 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 II of PILPG’s 2022 Civil Society Documentation Roundtable Series. Part I, which took place on January 21, 2022, focused on the subject of The Use of Digital Evidence in International Courts. 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? Join our experts to discuss these pertinent issues facing the international legal community as they explore the benefits and challenges that digital data collection presents to international courts.

Event Recording

SpeakerS

**Heather Sussman**
Heather Egan Sussman is the head of Orrick’s global Cyber, Privacy & Data Innovation Group. She focuses on privacy, cybersecurity and information management. Heather routinely guides clients through the existing patchwork of laws impacting privacy and cybersecurity around the globe. In the United States this includes advising on federal and state laws such as CCPA, FCRA, ECPA, TCPA, HIPAA, CAN-SPAM, GLBA, state breach-notification laws, and state data-security laws, as well as existing self-regulatory frameworks. Outside of the United States she manages teams of talented counsel around the world to deliver seamless advice for clients that operate across many jurisdictional lines, developing comprehensive privacy and cybersecurity programs that address competing regulatory regimes. Heather also helps clients reduce the risk of privacy and security incidents, and in the event of a privacy or security breach, she helps companies respond. Heather is recognized by *Chambers* and *The Legal 500* as a leader in her field.

**Dr. Mistale Taylor**
Dr. Mistale Taylor is Counsel at PILPG and an Associate Research Manager at Trilateral Research. She conducts research into emerging technologies as they relate to law, ethics, and society. Her areas of interest include public international law, international human rights law, and data protection law. Mistale is an Adjunct Professor at Vesalius College in Brussels, where she teaches IT law and public international law. She is also a Fellow of academic research center, the Brussels Privacy Hub. In 2018, she defended her PhD at Utrecht University.

**Matt Davis**
Matt is a Visiting Lecturer in Law and Researcher at Birmingham City University. He has taught criminal law, public law, international law, and human rights law. He is also a Visiting Researcher at Free University of Berlin. Matt is Contra Nocendi International’s Executive Director and has led many of the organization's interventions at international human rights mechanisms. His interests include leveraging data for human rights monitoring and human rights monitoring in fluid security environments. He has spoken on panels ranging from leveraging data for accountability to access to counsel.

**Stephanie Munro Courtney**
Stephanie Munro Courtney was the logistics coordinator for the PILPG Rohingya project. At the time, she was a PILPG intern working on the Rohingya team and preparing the informational report for investigators to review upon arrival in Bangladesh. A few weeks later, she landed in Bangladesh herself, tasked with recruiting interpreters, securing necessary equipment, and ensuring the team had what they needed each day to go into the field (sometimes that meant finding peanut butter!).
Stephanie graduated law school in 2018 and now works for a firm in California. She also does pro bono work for an international non-profit, but dreams of one day becoming a fully fledged field investigator. On the ground, she took the lead in organizing and training interpreters and stays in regular contact with the team of interpreters in Bangladesh.

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.