This week, Rebecca Bakos Blumenthal, Starvation and Humanitarian Crisis Lead at Global Rights Compliance, spoke on the panel Witness to War: How Journalists Can Safeguard Digital Evidence for Justice, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia — one of the world’s leading gatherings of journalists, editors, and media professionals.
Rebecca joined investigative reporters and digital forensic experts to explore a critical and often overlooked question: when journalists document war crimes, what determines whether that material can actually be used in court?
She addressed the tensions at the heart of this work — the irreplaceable access journalists have in conflict zones, often where investigators cannot go, and the equally real risk that well-intentioned documentation efforts can prove counterproductive. She stressed that journalism and accountability work share a common commitment to bearing witness and establishing facts, but operate under different mandates and standards — and that understanding that gap is essential.
Rebecca also illustrated how the disconnect between compelling storytelling and legally useful evidence can have real consequences for accountability. Using GRC’s work on the use of starvation as a method of warfare as an example, she highlighted how some of the most powerful imagery from conflict zones may actually be obscuring the very crimes they appear to document. While graphic images of severe malnutrition are vital for capturing the gravity of suffering and driving public attention, from a legal perspective, they may not be what prosecutors need most. To prove starvation as a war crime, it is the deprivation of objects indispensable to survival that must be established — not the consequences themselves. Knowing what to look for, and how to record it, makes all the difference.
She drew on GRC’s Basic Investigative Standards for International Crimes and GRC’s Starvation Training Manual — practical tools setting out minimum standards for documenting international crimes — outlining the principles that should guide any documentation effort.
Watch the video recording online.