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Digital Evidence: Facilitating What and for Whom?
The emergence of user-generated evidence has revolutionized how atrocities and human rights violations are documented globally. Since 2011, when Syrian human rights defenders began documenting atrocities on their smartphones, a professional field has emerged around the collection, authentication, and preservation…
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Criminalizing Ecocide
Amid widespread acknowledgment that we live on a planet in peril, the term “ecocide” packs a powerful rhetorical punch. Extant regulatory approaches to environmental protection feel insufficient in the face of the triple threat of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity…
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“What Kind of Court is This?” Perceptions of International Justice Among Rohingya Refugees
Among human rights scholars and practitioners, global justice is a sacred aspiration that finds expression in institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and investigative bodies established by the United Nations (UN) Human…
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Would Prosecuting Putin Prolong the War in Ukraine?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling for the creation of a special international tribunal on aggression that could hold Russian President Vladimir Putin to account for starting an illegal war in Ukraine. Although the International Criminal Court is investigating the war crimes…
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Future-proofing U.S. law for international investigations in the digital era
Advances in information technology have irrevocably changed the nature of war crimes investigations. The pursuit of accountability for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community now invariably requires access to digital evidence. The global reach of platforms…
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Platform-Enabled Crimes
B.C. L. Rev (2022). Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day, across the globe, the corporations that run these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. Sometimes, these seemingly banal business activities enable…
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Governing the Global Public Square
Harv. Int’l L. J. (2021). Social media platforms are the public square of our era – a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And this online space…
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User-Generated Evidence
Rebecca Hamilton, User-Generated Evidence, Col. J. Transnat’l L. (2018) Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. Smartphone apps designed to allow Users to record material that will meet evidentiary standards are now freely available. User-Generated Evidence is…
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Ukraine’s Push to Prosecute Aggression: Implications for Immunity Ratione Personae and the Crime of Aggression
Russia has not – and will not – provide such consent. If an aggression indictment is to be formally issued, it will need to come through a newly created tribunal. Just a week after Russia’s February 24 invasion, Chatham House…
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Model Indictment of President Vladimir Putin for the Crime of Aggression,
What follows is a model of a criminal indictment against President Vladimir Putin for the crime of initiating and executing a war of aggression against Ukraine. The indictment represents the type of document international war crimes prosecutors or national prosecutors…
Scholarship
Bec’s scholarship has been published in the Yale Journal of International Law, Human Rights Quarterly, Harvard International Law Journal, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Human Rights Journal, and other leading publications.