Proving international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression – is often hampered by a lack of evidence and inaccessible crime scenes. Digital technology purports to offer a solution: videos and images captured on smartphones and shared online are increasingly used as evidence. Yet this introduces novel uncertainties to the legal decision-making process: overwhelming volumes of audiovisual material, often of unknown origin, with rising risks of (AI) manipulation. These conditions challenge established methods of assessing, among others, evidence quality, sufficiency, and ensuring equality of arms, requiring a careful consideration of the risks of committing epistemic injustice and violating the right to a fair trial. This digital revolution is also reshaping fundamental aspects of criminal justice: the role of witnesses and the primacy of human judgment.
The project examines this core question of legal epistemology: how is legal truth determined when the evidentiary basis is increasingly characterised by new types of uncertainty? Specifically, it investigates how the uncertainties surrounding the provenance and authenticity of digital audiovisual evidence influence legal decision-making in the investigation and adjudication of international crimes.
Methodologically, the project combines experimental vignette methods with deep practitioner engagement through interviews and expert meetings to uncover causal mechanisms of decision-making and ground them in real-world practice. The findings will advance the epistemology of international criminal law at a critical time for the field, contributing to a more robust theory of legal decision-making and providing an empirical foundation for policy recommendations that enable fairer and more effective assessment of digital evidence.
Beyond its substantive contributions, the project advances methodological innovation in international criminal law, where experimental approaches remain rare, generating new empirical data and laying the groundwork for future research.