Satellite imagery has been used for over a decade now to better understand conflicts and patterns of possible human rights violations in places where information is hard to obtain. In June 2007, Amnesty International USA’s began its Eyes on Darfur project: a website that published satellite images of vulnerable villages in Sudan. This intended to publicize the conflict and alert the Sudanese authorities that the international community was watching, with the ultimate goal of reducing violence.
This was a novel approach, which filled a gap because Sudan’s government refused to issue entry visas to human rights organizations. As researchers couldn’t get in themselves, they turned to the data being collected thousands of miles overhead.
The project was clearly well-intentioned, and Eyes on Darfur received a great deal of attention. Yet few people paid attention to the aftermath.
An image of Hermeda Village in Darfur before it was burned, 2014
Surprisingly and sadly, according to the dissertation of humanitarian staffer Grant Gordon, Eyes on Darfur actually led to greater violence. Gordon’s analysis of US State Department data on damaged and destroyed villages found that in the villages being monitored, violence actually increased by 15% during the project and 20% in the following year. There was also an 8% rise in violence in neighboring areas. Eyes on Darfur came to an end in January 2008 because Amnesty was aware of anecdotal reports of heightened violence.
Gordon argues that this was principally due to retaliation. As Amnesty didn’t have boots on the ground in Sudan, the main way for the Sudanese government to punish it was by inflicting greater violence on the villages Amnesty was attempting to help.
Gordon’s research points to the importance of timing and context when working out whether a satellite monitoring project like this one will have the intended effect. After all, a regime bent on genocide, or deep in the throes of war, may not be dissuaded by foreign human rights NGOs.
It also raises broader ethical questions. Amnesty didn’t inform the residents of the villages it selected that they would be undergoing extra monitoring. For a first-of-its-kind application of technology in an active conflict zone, it’s sobering that these Sudanese people were essentially treated as guinea pigs.
Yet satellite imagery is an irresistible tool for documenting human rights abuses. And as Gordon writes, “As these technologies become more affordable and more common, so too will this type of monitoring.”
One recent application has been the investigation of secretive internment camps of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. The BBC’s comparison of images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel database shows speedy construction of sites that the Chinese government is defending as “re-education centers,” but are part of a larger campaign to shrink Uighur identity. The BBC’s analysis suggests that these facilities are mushrooming at a massive scale, and are as large as some of the world’s biggest prisons. And satellite surveillance is one way that journalists and human rights workers can attempt to counteract the intense surveillance operations that the Chinese government has trained on Uighur populations.
Dying trees near a radioactive waste storage area at the Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea, ... [+]
One of China’s neighbors is also being watched to detect large-scale human rights violations. Reporters, researchers, and human rights workers are using satellite imagery of North Korean sites to better understand a range of activity, including nuclear sites, infrastructure, prisons, and economic development.
Sarah Son, the research director of a South Korean NGO, explains how the Transitional Justice Working Group uses this technology. The TJWG encourages North Korean defectors in South Korea to share their stories, including information about public executions and mass graves. Son reflects, “The aha moment or shock moment comes when you are with individuals who plain and simply have been through an extraordinary amount of trauma…yet they’re still willing to come and help.” The ultimate aim is to elicit information that will help with investigations, allow for burial, or give families information about relatives who have disappeared.
The TJWG’s four-year Mapping Project has involved over 600 interviews. These allow researchers to identify public events that many interviewees describe in similar ways, and using similar location markers (such as bridges and rivers). The researchers ask the interviewees to sketch the locations of these events before showing them Google Earth images and having them check these. One finding from this project is that North Korean officials appear to repeatedly use the same locations for public executions. Common sites include riverbeds, open fields, marketplaces, and school grounds.
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Son gives some caveats. Because this use of satellite technology is so recent, the international legal system isn’t sure what to make of it. “Judges have only tended to refer to it rarely and somewhat vaguely in their judgments,” Son says.
And while there’s great public enthusiasm for contributing to remote human rights mapping, from the thousands of citizen activists involved in the Eyes for Darfur project to the enthusiasts of open-source mapping tools like OpenStreetMap, there are high stakes if mistakes are made.
In 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a now-notorious speech claiming that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq. He referred to a satellite image of a decontamination vehicle, which he called “a signature item” for the storage of chemical munitions. Powell’s intelligence staff later concluded that this “decontamination vehicle” was a water truck with legitimate uses – not a piece of evidence for WMDs.
And in 2018, the New York Times published an article with a misleading headline based on images of a missile base in North Korea. Thus, Son cautions, “Mistakes can occur when non-experts are involved.” Satellite images used in situations of conflict and oppression need to be interpreted very carefully – and triangulated alongside other types of evidence.
So observers should proceed carefully. Satellite imagery is an important instrument for documenting crimes against humanity, but the human rights world still needs a full set of tools.
