Thank you very much. So in terms of some of the benefits of open source information, well,

this information can be really useful in providing lead evidence. So in a project I led called

OSR for Rights, my colleagues and I spoke to a lot of investigators. They spoke about the

value of open source information in helping them come up with an investigative plan,

in figuring out what are the big things that they need to focus on in their investigations

and so forth. It can also of course provide direct evidence of violations or indeed maybe

what we might call contextual information. So information that shows which troops were in the

area at the time that a particular incident took place or the clues like the uniforms worn by

perpetrators might give a clue as to whether these atrocities are linked to the individual

who's standing trial. One thing that's come out a lot in recent years I think has been the

difficulty in securing good eyewitness testimony in the context of international crimes trials.

You know, witnesses are sometimes unwilling to come forward or a lot of time might have passed

between the time of the events in question and the time that actually someone gets put on trial for

these. You know, and human memory is a frail thing. And so if you have a piece of open source

information that might be a contemporaneous account, to a large extent that might be really

helpful in either corroborating a witness's account or indeed challenging it. It might be that

a witness has told you that this incident happened but then through open source investigation it

turns out that it's not the full picture. Something that comes up in the literature a lot is the so

called democratising potential of open source information. So in theory at least anyone can

pick up their own personal digital device and start recording and share that with the world.

So it's not as mediated perhaps by some of the issues of bias and power that can affect who

investigators get to speak to in an on the ground investigation. We'll come back to that point in

the moment. And in terms of other advantages, the last one is just overcoming some of the access

barriers that have really plagued investigations in recent years. So this is where investigators

are simply denied access or just haven't been able to travel to meet witnesses because it's

too dangerous either for themselves or usually for those witnesses. So it provides a different

way to kind of figure out what's happened. In terms of some of the challenges, there are many.

So one is just the sheer volume of evidence and we might think about some of the fair trial

concerns that might arise as a result of the volume of evidence. So if you've got the

principle of equality of arms that the prosecution and defence should have an equal opportunity

to present their case but then you've got these armed conflicts where you've got millions of pieces

of evidence that could potentially be introduced in a trial. So ensuring that the defence or

each party has the ability to really verify that content, to challenge it if necessary,

if there's some concerns about its authenticity, so forth, and have the skills and the resource

and the people to be able to do that is hugely challenging actually. And related to that,

the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has a duty to examine both incriminating and

exonerating circumstances equally. But what we've seen in recent years has been a real

lively and active civil society movement that's been really involved in preserving evidence of

atrocity crimes. So there are some questions that are raised there in terms of they're obviously

not under the same obligation to also investigate exonerating material as well as incriminating.

And we could see that that might be a potential challenge to admissibility.

Other challenges include, so earlier we mentioned the advantage of the democratising potential,

amplifying marginalised voices. My colleagues and I have written quite a lot on what we call the

blind spots of open source information. And we talk about the different types of bias that might

come into play when we talk about this kind of content. So we've put it into three buckets,

access bias, so who has the ability to be able to record and share this information online is,

of course, heavily mediated by the exact same issues of bias that come into real life

investigations as well. So who owns the technology, who's tech savvy enough, who's got the language

skills to ensure that what they want to share gets seen in a openness online environment.

All of these things are subject to various issues of accessibility of the technology