A smartphone focuses on people clustered on a dark road, backlit by streetlights and sheltered by skinny trees. The group is protesting as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which began in 2022 after Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian woman, died in police custody. The protesters are demanding fundamental political change, greater recognition of women’s rights, and an end to the violent enforcement of hijab laws by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Suddenly, the phone records the crack of three gunshots. By the third shot, the camera loses focus and appears to tumble out of its holder’s hands, capturing a thud as that person presumably hits the ground. The video, eventually uploaded to social media, will race across the internet — apparent footage of the killing of a protestor.
This video is one of millions recorded by activists and bystanders and shared to social media each year, broadcasting conflict and crisis from local communities to the broader world. Because of the potentially significant legal and journalistic value of such posts, collectives such as the Iran Digital Archive Coalition have formed to coordinate efforts to locate, verify, and amplify the stories of victims and survivors that are documented in digital spaces. In the case of the Coalition, which is composed of six leading investigative organizations with varying areas of expertise, the goal is to leverage one of the greatest strengths of digital open-source information: providing a glimpse of what is happening in countries that are difficult or impossible for foreign reporters, investigators, and others to access.
Although open-source information has proven a powerful resource for numerous investigations — from the cause of the downing of flight MH17 to contested killings in Bucha, Ukraine, to the Washington D.C. riots of January 6th — it has rarely been used to intentionally investigate gender-related crimes. As a result, our team at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley has been exploring how digital open-source data can be ethically and effectively deployed to strengthen investigations, prosecutions, research, and reporting on systematic and conflict-related sexual violence. Our efforts have resulted in two new outputs. One report, Gender Persecution in the Islamic Republic of Iran, illustrates how open-source information can help establish the elements of the international crime against humanity of gender persecution, for which there has yet to be a successful conviction. The second is a set of guidelines to help open-source practitioners incorporate minimum ethical standards when handling sensitive open-source data related to sexual violence.
Gender Persecution as a Crime Against Humanity
Although gender persecution as a crime against humanity was codified with the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998, there is little related jurisprudence from the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was not until 2010 that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor first referenced gender persecution as a basis for an arrest warrant. The ICC did not formally charge persecution on the basis of gender until 2018 in the Al Hassan case, which focused on crimes allegedly perpetrated in Timbuktu, Mali from 2012 to 2013.
Valerie Oosterveld, special adviser on crimes against humanity to the ICC Prosecutor, has stated that the “difficult nature” of the negotiations that led to the establishment of gender persecution as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute, coupled with the concomitant “opaque nature” of the resulting elements of the crime, may have served as an initial deterrent to the Prosecutor filing gender persecution cases. In an effort to encourage and strengthen investigations of gender persecution, Lisa Davis, special adviser to the Prosecutor of the ICC on gender persecution, and attorney Jaime Gher have drafted a seminal toolkit for Identifying Gender Persecution in Conflict and Atrocities. They point out that, despite over 20 years of official recognition, rarely is gender persecution documented, investigated, or prosecuted, leaving a massive gap in the effectuation of justice.
Despite the lack of accountability, gender persecution is undeniably occurring. Relying in part on open-source information, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (FFMI) issued a March 2024 report establishing that high-level officials in Iran had perpetrated gender persecution as a crime against humanity in the context of the protests and associated repression of fundamental rights, and through the Iranian government’s policies and enforcement of mandatory hijab. Similarly, our Coalition’s report spotlights 11 online-documented incidents in which Iranian forces appear to have perpetrated gender-related crimes against civilians. We conducted an in-depth analysis of these 11 incidents, selected from the many we identified, in order to underscore the powerful role that digital open-source information can play in establishing gender persecution under the Rome Statute. For example, open-source videos cited in the Coalition report establish that:
- Sepideh Rashnu was targeted due to her perceived defiance against mandatory hijab and her identity as someone fighting for greater gender equality in Iran;
- Zahra Haghighatian was sexually assaulted and detained by Iranian forces while peacefully protesting for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement;
- Mehdi Hazrati was fatally shot and killed by Iranian forces suppressing Woman, Life, Freedom protesters; and
- Numerous women were violently detained by morality police enforcing the Iranian government’s mandatory hijab
The report also illustrates how investigations into gender-related crimes are accompanied by additional and heightened ethical challenges. As a result of such challenges, our investigators spent a substantial time in the initial phases of the investigation identifying relevant principles to guide the investigation. These ethical principles and procedures reflected those in the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, which sets minimum international standards for digital open-source investigations. The ethical principle of “do no harm,” for example, requires that the safety, integrity, and dignity of victims and survivors be prioritized throughout the investigation. For ethical guidance and legal analysis, Coalition investigators also relied heavily on the ICC’s 2022 Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution and additional guidance provided by the Gender Persecution Toolkit.
Social media platforms continue to be an important tool for Iranian people seeking to share their experiences with an international audience. Despite this, the FFMI’s second report, released in March, noted that the Iranian government had ramped up its use of technology to surveil women and girls for lack of compliance with mandatory hijab and engaging in protests, showing how digital technologies can be a double-edged sword. As a result, we were very careful about which incidents we chose to amplify in our report. The incidents we selected from social media were those that appeared to pose minimal risk to survivors’ physical, digital, and psychosocial security. We considered the survivor’s or their family’s apparent interest in bringing attention to their experiences, as well as (in several cases) insights provided by those with direct contact with the survivors and their loved ones. Investigators did not delve further when security or ethical risks were relatively unclear.
Who Is Targeted and Why
Investigators on this project utilized an approach that considered “intersectionality,” the ways in which different forms of persecution may overlap, such as gender, class, religion, or ethnicity. This intersectional approach to our analysis led to a better understanding of the experiences of the victims and survivors. The works of Alexandra Lily Kather describe intersectionality and positionality (the relationship of the researcher or investigator to the situation they are investigating) as central pillars in the ecosystem of international criminal justice work. Priya Gopalan has similarly depicted intersectionality analysis as a potent tool to further a fundamental precept of international criminal law, finding such an analysis foundational to the conception and analysis of an investigation.
With regards to crimes carried out in Iran, the intersectional nature of the attacks on victims is apparent. All of the people featured in our report were targeted on the basis of gender-related activities According to the FFMI, however, civilians residing in Kurdish-majority or Baluch-majority regions (ethnic groups in Iran) suffered disproportionate discrimination during the Iranian government’s violent crackdown. This included enhanced targeting and suffering especially violent attacks, along with receiving harsher punishments than people from other demographics. Poorer families with fewer resources to fight state persecution have also been disproportionately victimized, and their attackers enjoy a higher rate of impunity.
Open-source information confirmed these complexities for several of the investigation’s victims. Focusing solely on gender–and not the ways in which people were also targeted on the basis of ethnicity or class–would have obfuscated the intersectional nature of the Iranian government’s crimes. The inclusion of investigators with relevant cultural and linguistic knowledge, specialized knowledge of Iran-related digital spaces, and familiarity with gender issues in Iran was imperative to identifying meaningful open-source content, but also to analyzing content in a manner that was as ethical and effective as possible.
International Guidelines for Open-Source Practitioners
To support the broader and growing interest in using digital open-source information for systematic and conflict-related sexual violence and expand these insights to contexts outside of Iran, we have been working with the Institute for International Criminal Investigations over the past two years to develop an Open-Source Pracitioner’s Guide to the Murad Code. Officially titled the Global Code of Conduct for Gathering and Using Information about Systematic and Conflict Related Sexual Violence (SCRSV), the Murad Code shares minimum standards for the “safe, effective and ethical gathering of information about SCRSV.” The Code was named after human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Nadia Murad. Released in 2022, the Murad Code was designed to help investigators gather information about SCRSV in ways that are survivor-centered and trauma-informed, to improve the experience of survivors when participating in investigative processes. However, the Murad Code focuses on the primary means of collecting evidence in cases of sexual and gender-based violence: interviews with survivors, which assume direct contact with those most affected. It spends little time on the identification, verification, and use of digital data discovered online.
The just-released draft of the Open-Source Practitioner’s Guide is motivated by Principle 8 of the Murad Code, which directs researchers to also “gather information from other sources” including “information which is not from…survivors” as well as “indirectly sourced information” such as information from the public domain, online archives, or otherwise accessible online. The guidelines translate the principles of the Murad Code, but re-order the guidance to better mirror an open-source investigation workflow. The new draft also spotlights issues that investigators should consider and prepare for, especially during the planning and preparation phase. We hope other researchers and investigators will use the draft guidelines and share feedback about their experience, which we will then incorporate into a final version to be translated into multiple languages and formally launched later this year.
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