IJCentral: International Justice Central

When Oprah signs up for Twitter, which she just has as reported by the NYTimes, does it make the service more valuable to the people using it or just more valuable as an instant broadcasting tool for micro-marketing?

Just last week there was so much excitement over the potential for a strong deployment of citizen journalism and political activism through the use of SMS text messaging.  Equally as strong, is a very active celebrity trend on Twitter.  Not only has Oprah just joined but celebs from the likes of Britney Spears to Al Gore are using the platform to send messages on a daily basis.  Ashton Kutcher made a race out of becoming the first person to have 1 million followers and has just crossed that mark after agreeing to appear on Oprah.  The molting period of any new technology can always be a stressful thing due to its nature to change so rapidly and the momentum that Twitter has been gaining is just that.  We must ask ourselves and wonder, will this be a digital revolution or another tech bubble burst?   

Oprah still has the potential to do something good with this service.  As is well known, she commands a large and very dedicated audience that is famous for instantly popularizing anything she endorses. Will Oprah take the right path and find ways to Tweet for good? 

It’s hard to overstate the reach of radio in Africa, and the potential that the medium holds for the defense of human rights.  And now with the spread of mobile phones and SMS text messaging throughout the continent, radio activists have found a happy marriage between the old and the new. Last week after one of the screenings of “The Reckoning” in The Hague Movies That Matter Festival, we had the pleasure of being on a panel with Tajeldin Abdalla Adam, or simply Taj, and he told us about Radio Dabanga, a short-wave radio station operating out of the city of Hilversum in Holland and broadcasting news to the Darfuri population in the Darfuri IDP camps of Sudan and the Darfuri refugee camps over the border in Chad.  They get news directly from the camps: people call or send SMS texts to Radio Dabanga and hang up, and then Radio Dabanga immediately calls them back so there is no additional expense for the caller.  This allows the Darfuri journalists at Radio Dabanga to get reports from the ground about what’s happening in the camps, and they corroborate the information with other people that are working with them within the camps and sending the information back using mobile phones, and then Radio Dabanga broadcasts the news to all the camps, where people gather to listen to the daily morning program.  Taj had an interesting take on the argument that the ICC warrants for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir have worsened the situation for Darfuris in the camps because the humanitarian relief organizations were thrown out by al-Bashir after the warrants for him were issued.  Taj feels that the humanitarian organizations and the international community should have seen it coming, and should have prepared for it.  Far from blaming the ICC for their deepening plight, Darfuris have the common sense to place the blame where it lies, in the person of Omar al-Bashir and his lethal state apparatus.  Taj confirmed a report we had heard that in Kalma, one of the larger IDP camps with 90,000 people, they are refusing any offers of food and water from the Sudanese government, fearing that the supplies would be poisoned.

When we were in the war ravaged town of Bunia, capital of the Ituri region of eastern Congo, filming for “The Reckoning”, we shot a scene with Richard Pituwa and Wanda Hall, who produce a program called “Interactive Radio for Justice”.  They broadcast information about the International Criminal Court (ICC), and respond to questions sent to them by SMS from listeners in the region.  Due to the fact that the 4 people now facing justice at the ICC in The Hague are all from the DR Congo, and 3 of them are from Ituri (Thomas Lubanga, Germain Katanga, and Mathieu Ngudjolo), this has created a great deal of local interest in the Court.  In one program that we filmed, Richard and Wanda had ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo on the line from The Hague, taking questions from listeners that were coming in as SMS text messages.  This marriage of radio and SMS is clearly a fantastic way to hear the voices and concerns of people who have had to endure the violence that continues to ravage central Africa, and to build local awareness and understanding of the international justice interventions that are affecting their lives.

There seems to be a growing trend for citizen journalism afoot in the blogosphere, and Twitter could be the avant garde for this movement.  Over the past several years, people have begun to turn to their mobile phones for more and more information. Mobile phones have become one of the most common items people carry in the world along with their keys and wallets.  This is an amazing statistic considering it spans across the globe and across economic divides.  From CEO’s of large corporations to nomadic Bedouin’s, the mobile phone has made itself the tool that can bridge the gap in universal communication. 

One of the most exciting movements that mobile phones have brought about has to do with anyone being able to report news on the ground first-hand.  With a simple text that is restricted to 140 characters, people have been reporting on such crises as the Mumbai terror attacks or the US Airways Hudson river plane crash.  Another trend in this movement is people using Twitter to organize and rally crowds for political protests.  This has been very recently applied in Moldova and was so successful that the government suspended cell phone and internet service temporarily to stop all of the information that was getting out about the political turmoil from the protesters.

Where this leaves us of course is with a lot of questions. Can this type of journalism become a new norm?  What are the potential drawbacks including the vetting of information?  Where do we go from here? 

Some of the years recent Twitter chatter:

Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter
NYTimes 4.7.09:

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.

The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

Twittering the USAirways Plane Crash
WSJ Blogs 1.15.09:

Janis Krums, a guy with a camera and a penchant for social media tools, posted one of the first and most remarkable photos today of US Airways Flight 1549 after it crash-landed in the Hudson River.

“There’s a plane in the Hudson,” the Sarasota native wrote on the microblogging site Twitter just as reports began to break of the plane hitting the water off Manhattan’s west side. “I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

SF Activists Use Twitter to Coordinate War Protest
MarketingVOX 3.21.08:

To mark the fifth anniversary of the US occupation of Iraq, anti-war protesters in San Francisco used the micro-blogging service Twitter to coordinate their movements throughout the day.

Organizers typically use walkie-talkies and a bullhorn to coordinate protesters, but those carrying radios are usually the first to be arrested by the police.

“We haven’t waited 17 years to get justice…we’ve fought 17 years to get justice.”  This quote from Eduardo Gonzalez of the International Center for Transitional Justice is in reference to the victims and members of Peruvian civil society that have been struggling since 1992, without pause, to have Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori face justice for the human rights violations perpetrated during his 10-year regime. We met Eduardo in 2002 when he was working with the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and Pamela Yates and I were scouting to make “State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism”, the Skylight Pictures documentary about Peru’s 20-year “war on terror” with Shining Path, which covers the role that Fujimori played in gutting his country’s democracy in the name of security, committing the crimes that led to today’s guilty verdict and 25-year sentence.  Today is a big day for all Peruvians that want their country to be ruled by law, but Fujimori’s supporters will surely retaliate as they are a violent cohort.
It’s the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of rights abuses, and Gisela Ortiz and Raida Condor (pictured here) deserve a lot of the credit for it, as they battled tirelessly for 17 years to see Fujimori face justice for ordering their brother and son killed in the La Cantuta massacre.  In Q&As for “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court” I often point to the example that Latin American civil society presents to the world: since the 60s and 70s, when the majority of the region was ruled by dictatorships, we have come to a present ruled by democracies.  It’s a remarkable achievement of what was considered to be an impossible task: namely, to have military leaders and politicians face justice for abuses committed against their own citizens.  To those who criticize the ICC arrest warrants charging Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity and war crimes, saying that it will be a setback for peace, I say look at Latin America and the role that the rule of law played in the continent’s transformation to democracy.

This Just in!

OSI Fellow and author Bec Hamilton has just announced via Enough Project’s website that she will be giving people a unique opportunity to ask questions about Darfur Policy to the policy makers themselves. She is currently in The Hague and will be interviewing former U.N. Special Representative on Sudan Jan Pronk and current ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.  By submitting questions to her website you can have an opportunity to have your questions be answered on record.  Here is a bit of the post:

“Sitting talking with the former head of U.N. Peacekeeping in New York last week, it struck me that there are many citizen advocates out there who would relish the opportunity to quiz some of these people on Darfur policy, so I thought of one way to try and share the opportunity…

I recently set up a website where I will post upcoming interviews with people who are willing to take questions on the record from you. I’m in The Hague right now, and two of the people I have just spoken with agreed to take your questions: The former U.N. Special Representative on Sudan Jan Pronk and the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. If you would like to ask either of them a question about Darfur policy – past, present or future – go to the “Submit a Question” tab on the website.”

Take this opportunity and make yourself heard!

“The Reckoning” yesterday completed its 30-day tour of European Human Rights Film Festivals, including 3 screenings sponsored by the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs in Zurich, Fribourg and Geneva.  It is always remarkable to experience a film with audiences, especially when the film is just coming out of the gate (the world premiere of “The Reckoning” was at the Sundance Film Festival 09 in January) where 6 full houses put the film in front of about 2,000 people.  During the European tour all 3 filmmakers (Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and myself) of “The Reckoning” we’re on hand for discussions and Q&As after the screenings, in Paris, Prague, London, Zurich, Fribourg, Geneva and The Hague.  It’s incredibly useful because you get a sense of how the film is working, what it is communicating to people who for the most part know little about the ICC, or have a narrow focus on one aspect of the international justice system.  Even many people who work at the ICC told us that until watching the film they hadn’t had a clear idea of how all the parts of the Court’s work came together in different parts of the world.  “The Reckoning” will be a great entry point for many, and with the follow through to IJCentral we hope to expand the global constituency for the ICC and international justice.

In The Hague premiere on April 3, a truly moving event with “The Reckoning” coming home in a sense, about 500 people packed the Spui Theater, and ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo was on hand to answer questions and talk about the work he is doing in his mandate to bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide to justice.  At one point he asked members of the audience to rise if they worked or had worked at the ICC, and more than half the audience got up, followed by the rest of the audience which gave them a standing ovation.  It was a beautiful moment.  It was truly refreshing to see this unabashed enthusiasm for the Court during these difficult times when the ICC’s credibility is being challenged by the Arab League and the African Union over the warrants of arrest that have been issued for Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. On top of that there are those critics who prefer to blame the Prosecutor for al-Bashir’s decision to expel humanitarian groups from Darfur’s Internally Displaced Persons camps, saying that ICC chose the wrong moment to issue arrest warrants.  Huh?  Nobody forced al-Bashir to ratchet up his criminal behavior by denying humanitarian aid to people he has forced into the camps in the first place, and it’s good to remember that Al-Bashir has been behaving like this for the twenty years since he took power in a military coup: he presided over the deaths of 2 million in the war with southern Sudan; in the 90s he armed and supplied and gave safe haven to the Lord’s Resistance Army so that they could keep on committing atrocities in northern Uganda; and for the past 6 years he has been attacking Darfur.  What would be a better time to issue an arrest warrant for a serial genocidaire like al-Bashir?

Here we are in The Hague, with the Dutch Premiere of “The Reckoning” coming this evening, opening the Camara Justitia section of the Movies That Matter/Amnesty International Film Festival.  The festival organizers are anticipating a sold-out screening at the beautiful Theater Spui.  We were there last night for the opening of the festival, where Princess Mabel of the Netherlands introduced our friend Gini Reticker and Sugars Cooper, and Gini’s great film “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” in which Sugars appears as one of the group of Liberian women that used non-violent resistance to fight for peace in Liberia when it was under the rule of Charles Taylor.  There were also several mentions of “The Reckoning” by the Mayor of The Hague and Festival Director Taco, which was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

It’s ironic that Taylor is now locked up here in The Hague on trial under the jurisdiction of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (the ICC has loaned them their courtroom for the trial since it was deemed too dangerous to hold it in Sierra Leone), and that one of the subjects in “The Reckoning”, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is also locked up here and on trial.  In fact, Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy and I went to the ICC yesterday to see the trial of Lubanga in session.  It’s always sobering and satisfying to see the wheels of justice turning.  I was thinking that it would be good to have a screening of “The Reckoning” at Scheveningen prison here in The Hague, where Lubanga, Taylor, Katanga, Ngudjolo and Bemba are all in custody, hopefully soon to be joined by al-Bashir and Kony - a rough gallery of warlords and rogue leaders.

The potential for mobile technology to make waves and bring change to the ever-evolving fight for international justice is a crucial and fundamental philosophy that we here at IJCentral strongly believe in.  Since our inception we have always believed that what has made us different is our focus on global conversations through mobile phones. Currently we are using Twitter as our prototype platform here in the US and other participating countries. In the future we hope expand using such programs as FrontlineSMS to expand our network and put it in the hands of literally any user with a mobile phone in the world. This goal is an often exciting and humbling task.

We wanted to announce that IJCentral has been invited to present at this years UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge where 9 other groups will also be presenting ideas that will try to help evolve the application of mobile technology to Human Rights work around the world. It is very exciting to have been accepted and we would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Here is some info on the HRC conference:

“The Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley is pleased to announce the Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge.  Recent innovations in science and technology, especially mobile technologies, have provided human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists with new tools to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and disseminate this information in real time throughout the world. Cell phones, combined with GPS, cameras, video, audio, and SMS are transforming the way the world understands and responds to emerging crises. Handheld data collection devices, such as PDAs, provide researchers with new ways of documenting mass violence and attitudes toward peace, justice, and social reconstruction in conflict zones.”

The Human Rights Center is sponsoring a challenge to encourage innovations for applying mobile technologies for human rights investigations and advocacy. Through a NetSquared Community vote, 10 finalists will be chosen. All 10 finalists will be invited to present their ideas at an international conference, “The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media,” at UC Berkeley, May 4 and 5, 2009. A panel of judges, selected by the Human Rights Center, will choose three winners, to be announced at the conference. Winners will receive cash awards of $15,000 (first place), $10,000 (second place), and $5,000 (third place) to implement their ideas.

Find more videos like this on Soul of the New Machine

It’s great to see the Twitter flurry that came up on IJCentral yesterday as a result of conflicting reports about al-Bashir’s visit to Sudan - Sudan Times reported he had sent his VP, Mahi, but other reports including the NY Times have conclusively shown that not only was al-Bashir in Doha, but he was warmly received by the other Arab leaders at the Arab League summit.  This is a shame, but also it’s easy to see why rallying around al-Bashir is a no-brainer for despotic Arab leaders, who may fear the ICC and can rally the ‘Arab street’ around the idea that justice is not being meted out equally, as there have been no sanctions for Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza, or Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006.  Of course any investigation into those conflicts would have to include all parties, not just Israel.

Getting back to Twitter, there are indications that Twitter might become available as a free service around the world again, if they can work out deals with mobile phone carriers.  This is how Twitter used to be when it started, and its power as a tool for human rights and international justice awareness would be mightily increased if that happens again.

These are tense days for supporters of the International Criminal Court.  We have to stand by and watch as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir flouts the arrest warrants issued for him by the ICC on March 4, charging him with crimes against humanity.  He has responded by expelling 13 international humanitarian groups from Sudan and shutting down 3 Sudanese humanitarian groups (apparently, according to a source who works coordinating relief organizations, Malaysian humanitarian groups are trying to fill the gap but don’t have the resources, neither logistical or financial). Then al-Bashir traveled to Eritrea, Egypt, Lybia and now to Qatar for the Arab League summit in Doha.

One of the main forces building against the ICC is the ‘Arab street’, because the perception that the ICC is targeting Africa and the Arab world, but not Israeli aggressions in Lebanon and Gaza, is gaining ground.  No matter that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Israel and Lebanon and Gaza since they have not ratified the Rome Statute - neither is Sudan a member, and that fact is being used to advantage by enemies of the ICC.  They claim that there is a double standard being applied by the UN Security Council, because they will issue a UNSC resolution to ask that Sudan be investigated for the conflict in Darfur, but do not issue a resolution asking that the ICC investigate the Israel/Hezbollah/Hamas conflicts.  This is a powerful argument, let’s face it, and if the ‘Arab street’ and Arab leaders move to let war criminals like al-Bashir off the hook because of this perceived double-standard, I don’t see how it could be perceived as anything but a setback for the ICC and for hopes of getting more Arab countries to ratify the Rome Statute (the only Arab countries that have ratified are Jordan, Djibouti and Comoros).

I think it would be behoove the world community to have transgressions of international humanitarian law in the Middle East investigated, whether they are coming from Israel, Hezbollah or Hamas. To get such a resolution out of the UNSC is not likely.  It would undoubtedly require UNSC reform, which has a power structure that still reflects the victors of WWII - no member of the P5 (Permanent 5 members of the UNSC, who each have veto power to kill any resolution) should have the power to singlehandedly stop a UNSC resolution - this is a structure that’s become obsolete and needs to be reformed for the sake of UN credibility.