Admission and role of digital open source evidence of international crimes: Ukraine and the ICC

• In Event: WG Organized Crime and Criminal Networks Panel 6. Organized crime: criminal justice & policing

Abstract

Since the opening of the investigation into the Situation in Ukraine, the ICC has issued four arrest warrants. At the same time, as of 20 February 2025, Ukrainian courts have issued 148 verdicts in cases on war crimes alone. According to the preliminary research results, in at least 8 of them, judges relied on digital open source evidence. In most cases, a judge relied on the social media profiles of the perpetrators to confirm his identity. In two genocide cases, digital open source materials were also the means of committing a crime of incitement to genocide. Meanwhile, the ICC has relied on digital open source evidence in the Al-Werfalli and Al Mahdi cases to confirm the commission of crimes by showing the videos of extrajudicial executions posted by perpetrators and the pictures of the destroyed objects protected by UNESCO. Thus, we see that there is a difference in the role this type of evidence plays in the ICC and Ukrainian courts. My research aims to establish the differences and similarities in the approaches to the admission and use of digital open source evidence of international crimes in the ICC and Ukrainian courts and to analyse to what extent they follow the existing recommendations on evaluating digital open source evidence, such as ‘Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations’, ‘Leiden Guidelines on the Use of Digitally Derived Evidence in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals’ and ‘Evaluating digital open source imagery: A guide for judges and fact-finders’.

Author

• Anastasiia Liulina, University of Groningen