RightsCon Toronto 2018

This panel will convene a session surrounding the use of low-tech solutions towards access to justice. It will consist of panelists from the Whistle Project, based out of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge, and Global Rights Nigeria, who have partnered with The Whistle in the development and launch of a digital human rights reporting platform, as a part of their ‘Rape is a Crime’ campaign. It will also feature Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, currently tackling the dearth in tools that combine discovery and verification in human rights reporting and the challenges faced by its analysts, and the Engine Room, whose expertise in the uses of digital data for human rights will be a connecting thread to the discussion.

Whilst the field of digital verification has been increasingly saturated with tools in recent years, there have been challenges in bringing together the process of discovery with the process of verification in one tool. Global Rights Nigeria has relied on capacity and trust-building with communities in varying human rights contexts; a qualitatively rich approach premised on the execution of successful campaigns with clear outcomes. Through their collaboration with The Whistle, the first iteration of a dashboard that connects witnesses and victims of sexual abuse with Global Rights, was developed. Enabling Global Rights Nigeria to facilitate a more expansive, but yet personalised and human campaign for data collection and discovery, the reporting app also seeks to erode prevalent extractiveness in the reporting process, through informing and educating victims and witnesses on next steps and nearby medical, legal and counselling services. Whilst Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps has benefitted greatly
from emerging digital verification tools, there has been a gap left behind by tools that do not adequately respond to the workflow needs of the DVC analysts, particularly the need to bring together discovery and verification; a gap that has initiated a conversation across all aforementioned organisations surrounding the need to rethink technologies for human rights reporting and verification.

Global Rights will lead with a presentation providing an overview of the challenges faced in human rights reporting and verification under a resource-constrained domestic human rights architecture. The Whistle team will provide an introduction to the product, and the gaps it sought to - and still seeks to - mitigate in both the discovery and verification space, which will be further expanded by Amnesty International.


As The Whistle project enters the development of the second-generation of its dashboard, Global Rights Nigeria nears the conclusion of the ‘Rape is a Crime’ campaign, and the Digital Verification Corps expands to more labs and analysts, the panel poses and addresses the need to develop discovery and verification tools in conversation with activist movements and campaigns. As the process of discovery will vary depending on socio-political and workflow contexts, so these coalitions become ever the more crucial. As such, the panel is also an opportunity to involve relevant experts (such as developers of digital verification and discovery tools from Benetech and RightsLab, and practitioners from the International Criminal Court), activist groups, and the broader audience, in an interactive discussion and ideation session on developing solutions for distinct human rights contexts. The panel’s aim is to:

1) Discover possibilities for scaling the approach to a modular version applicable to other contexts;
2) Identifying the challenges in sustainable reporting;
3) Learning about obstacles in terms of security.