Sylvanna Falcón is Founder and Director of the Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas and Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an award-winning scholar and a former consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Her publications include Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations (University of Washington Press, 2016) and Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship (University of Illinois Press, 2024). She is also the recipient of the 2020 Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching at UC Santa Cruz.
In this one-hour event, Professor Falcón talked about her work with the Human Rights Investigations Lab - how the Lab came to be and how it operates.
The discussion that followed focused on the methodology behind the lab's reports, which relies on Open Source Investigation (OSINT) techniques such as geolocation and chronolocation of images and videos. These techniques proved to be essential in documenting a wide range of harms and human rights violations, such as environmental harm, violence against migrants in the US-Mexico border, and murder and trafficking of indigenous women and girls.
Some of the questions highlighted the potential benefits and risk associated with the Lab's use of OSINT techniques. The risks are, according to Professor Falcón, essentially of a political nature - investigating on certain topics may be deemed a threat to national security of the concerned States. The benefits, however, cannot be overlooked. First, OSINT techniques may be used to shape and reinforce counternarratives against the spread of misinformation and disinformation, creating a better information environment. Secondly, since OSINT techniques can be (and already are) used for documenting a wide range of human rights and humanitarian law violations, they have the potential to enrich the value of international legal scholarship and analysis.
Finally, it was noted how the students involved in the Lab's activities acquired a useful set of skills that helped them with their careers, as some of them begun working with investigative organisations like BellingCat.
In conclusion, it was a tremendously interesting discussion which left us fascinated in the use of OSINT techniques to document human rights violations, and potentially advance the protection of human rights in affected communities.