Bridging the Expertise Gap: Integrating Technology in Justice & Accountability Work

Yesterday, JRR participated in a panel discussion on Innovation in Human Rights Investigation at the Rights X Summit 2025: Innovating for Humanity, a dynamic gathering of change-makers exploring how innovation can advance human rights in digital age organized by OHCHR.

This was the occasion for JRR to remind its partners of its unique expertise in this increasingly key sector – 23 JRR experts working at the intersection of technology and human rights – and how the integration of such expertise can further justice and accountability processes by contributing to data and information gathering, analysis, storage, security, archiving, and preserving critical information that could later be turned into evidence to support judicial and non-judicial processes.

During the event, JRR emphasized on the significant increase over the past years of the number of deployments it completed to its partners in this area, whether this is open-source investigations in Ukraine, digital forensics and facial imagery in the Maldives, or data management  in Iraq. This trend clearly highlights existing expertise gaps in the justice and human rights sector and the need to further build the capacity of justice actors.

Concretely, our experts, when deployed to international, national and civil society justice actors, can contribute to implement information and evidence management systems to improve the collection and preservation of critical data, contributing to improving the chain of custody process and the integrity of the information collected. Our experts can also collect, authenticate and analyze open-source data in a way that protects vulnerable witnesses, including women, LGBTQI+ persons, and children. Of course, our deployments don’t take place in silo, as our experts, for instance, integrate the wider investigation team, contributing to building capacity and transferring skills to a great number of beneficiaries.

Our participation to the Rights X summit was also a unique occasion for JRR to touch on its strategic partnership with the Institute for International Criminal Investigations and the Human Rights Center at the University of Berkeley, California, with whom we developed a project focused on strengthening accountability in the digital era. This project is currently at the fundraising stage and will aim to harness the full potential of digital technology to advance accountability for international crimes and grave human rights violations by making the provision of digital investigative experts, technological tools, guidance and capacity building available to a large and diverse group of partners.

Looking ahead, JRR hopes to secure the necessary funding and connect with new partners to be able to implement this project to: 1) integrate digital investigative expertise into accountability processes; 2) strengthen collaboration between key actors, 3) build the capacity of partners around the world; and 4) contribute to the development of practical guidance and policies in this sector.