Civil-Resistance Videography as Human Rights Practice: The Non-Survivor Testimony and the Striving for Criminal Jurisdiction in Syria and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract This paper brings together the legal discourse on user-generated evidence and a media-cultural study focus to explore videography in conflict contexts as human rights practice. Through examples of civilians and activists who have recorded, documented, and shared atrocities and human rights violations during the Syrian conflict with the help of mobile and social media, the conceptional challenges arising from this human rights practice are explored to further the understanding of witnessing and testimony in the presence of mobile and social media. While Syrians engage in the life-threatening endeavour of recording atrocities and human rights violations to bring justice to perpetrators and victims alike, their video clips contain often only little probative value in juridical terms. Still, current human rights initiatives exist that aim to introduce such user-generated evidence into international criminal proceedings with the support of witnessing apps. To understand the material-semiotic practices that underlie such initiatives, civil-resistance videography is introduced as connected to a broader debate on eye-witnessing, testifying, and providing legal evidence of atrocities and human rights violations that links back to the Eichmann trial and the advent of the survivor witness in criminal proceedings. Applying an analytical approach that combines the feminist understanding of diffraction, interference, figuration, and ethnography, the survivor witness is read as a testimonial figure that interferes with the emerging figure of the non-survivor witness in the context of civil-resistance videography. This interference brings forward the figuration of the non-survivor testimony that requires a conceptional rethinking in the legal and socio-political discourse on user-generated evidence.