Digital Investigation Techniques, Artificial Intelligence, and Mechanisms for Documenting International Humanitarian Law Violations

The documentation of violations of international humanitarian law has been transformed by the digital age. Where accountability once depended almost entirely on the testimony of witnesses and the recovery of physical evidence, investigators now draw on a vast and growing body of digital material, photographs, videos, satellite imagery and social-media posts, and on artificial-intelligence tools capable of processing it at a scale no human team could match. This article examines digital investigation techniques, artificial intelligence, and the mechanisms for documenting violations of international humanitarian law. It sets out the concepts of the violation and the documentation imperative, the principal techniques of digital open-source investigation, and the role and risks of artificial intelligence; it examines the legal and normative framework, comprising the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, the Rome Statute, the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, and the Ugandan framework under the International Criminal Court Act Cap 14, the Evidence Act Cap 8, the Electronic Transactions Act Cap 99 and the Computer Misuse Act Cap 96; and it analyses the reception of digital evidence before international courts through cases including Prosecutor v Al-Werfalli, Prosecutor v Al Hassan, Prosecutor v Tadic, Prosecutor v Lubanga and Prosecutor v Ongwen, and the work of mechanisms such as the IIIM for Syria, UNITAD and the eyeWitness project. The article argues that digital and artificial-intelligence techniques offer a powerful means of preserving evidence and overcoming the obstacles to accountability, but that their promise depends on rigorous standards of authentication, verification, transparency and the protection of privacy and witnesses, and it recommends the adoption of the Berkeley Protocol, governance of artificial intelligence, and the modernisation of national rules on electronic evidence.