Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-03-30
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Kamari Maxine Clarke, Full Professor, University of Toronto
Body cameras, satellites, and digital verification tools generate more evidence of violence than ever before. But it is still the institutions responsible for delivering justice that decide what constitutes evidence or not.
Some of the most striking reports on state-sanctioned violence concern disputes regarding evidence, namelywhich controls the videos, the metadata, and the channels on which the events are recorded in real time.
In Minnesota, in January 2026, this resulted in legal battles and public pressure for the preservation — and eventual release — of body camera footage from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following the murders ofAlex Pretti and Renée Good, alongside broader conflicts about federal transparency during immigration enforcement operations.
American national media have followed the use by the population of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal to identify and report ICE activities, which triggered an FBI investigation that, according to civil liberties experts, tests the boundary between protected surveillance and alleged “interference.”
Meanwhile, in Canada, the RCMP is deploying intervention cameras on a national scale, raising questions about whether the data collected by state security services could constitute afuture archive for complaint procedures, criminal prosecutions and civil litigation.
What we are witnessing is a “juriscopic regime” – a dense intertwining of scopical technologies (body cameras, satellites, open-source verification), scientific protocols, and legal standards of evidence that together govern what can be seen, verified, and regarded as “truth” – defining who the specialists are and which forms of knowledge are ignored due to their anecdotal, non-scientific, or non-legal nature.
How communities document violence
Citizensalso appropriate these documentation tools.
Families who have suffered violence and the forced disappearance or murder of loved ones are increasingly setting up local “evidence infrastructures” thanks to these technologies.
In Mexico, for example, colectivos – groups of families searching for their loved ones – use geolocation mapping, drone surveys, and other geospatial tools to identify possible clandestine grave sites and to document searches in real time, in order togenerate leads and urge reluctant institutions to act.
Some groups are experimenting with AI-assisted storytelling, creating “live” videos andother digital interventionsto maintain visibility of cases, while dealing with new risks such as digital extortion and retaliation resulting from the disclosure of personal information.
Also to read:
From Anthropic to Iran: who sets the limits on the use of AI in the fields of war and surveillance?
In Nigeria, families use thesocial networks and new portals dedicated to missing personsto widen the circle of people likely to recognize a face, a name, or a place, a form of participatory production for identification and information gathering, while official records are fragmented or difficult to access. In these contexts and many others around the world, communities organize mutual aid, warn others of threats, preserve data before it disappears, and transform private grief into collective and usable knowledge.
But visibility is unevenly distributed.
In this “revolution of evidence,” one might think that better visibility guarantees better justice, but in practice, it is the courts and legal institutions thatdecide what is considered to be the truth. It is this control that harms the recognition of damages and limits the measures taken as a result, and that restricts the scope of justice.
The legal limits of digital evidence
Human rights and international justice professionals increasingly rely on digital and visual evidence – satellite images, videos from participatory production, geolocation, and AI-assisted analyses –to document the damages and hold the perpetrators accountable.
The use of these technologies can even widen the gap between the victims and the evidence supposed to help them.
Relatives of missing persons often have extensive knowledge, but their expertise is not always taken seriously.
The law redefines what the term “evidence” means, and even the best technology must comply with the rules of evidence and institutional priorities, which restrict the possibilities for action – often in an opaque manner.
Already thousands of subscribers to the newsletter ofThe Conversation. And you? Subscribe to our freenewsletterto better understand the major contemporary issues.
Theresults of our recently published researchshow that these systems make certain forms of harm more visible than others. While this visibility can prove useful, disappearances, kidnappings, and many forms of state violence can be practically impossible to “see” from above.
In Nigeria, for example, these optical biases can also reproduce older hierarchies: communities that align with modern land regimes and sedentary settlement patterns may be more visible than nomadic or displaced populations, which determines which prejudices are considered as authoritative evidence.
We observe that optical and digital technologies do not merely reveal the truth; they are interpreted and validated by legal institutions and hierarchies of experts, sometimes relegating grassroots knowledge to the background.
Also to read:
Digital surveillance is omnipresent in China. Here is how citizens cope with it
At the International Criminal Court (ICC), for example, where cases of disappearances and mass crimes could potentially be tried, the rules concerning evidence and the court’s institutional priorities – the way it determines admissibility, relevance, and probative value – constitute obstacles to the admission of evidence. In the case of evidence derived from technology, the ICC relies on certain technical specialists to make it understandable to the judges.
As a result, socially constructed technical judgments govern the production of knowledge. Forensic science makes explicit what the ICC’s evidence law often implies: evidence is not things, but an inference.
Broadening the standards of evidence for justice
When a mother in Mexico or a sister in Nigeria searches for a missing or murdered loved one, she enters a regime of evidence long before the court. Her archive of “evidence” begins with a series of data: messages, observations, fragments of information, rumors, maps. Forensic science teaches us what must be done with this data for it to become viable evidence: is there a chain of custody? Contamination control? Validated methods? Honest statements of uncertainty?
But the family’s need to know the truth about what happened highlights the limitations of both forensic science and international courts.
A piece of evidence can be existentially decisive, but institutionally inadmissible; scientifically interpretable, but socially insufficient; legally convincing, but too late to put an end to disappearance as a lived condition on a daily basis.
In this gap, the struggle is not only about the facts, but about the question of which knowledge becomes official, and whether the truth is treated as a right due to families rather than as a byproduct of judicial pursuit.
The definition of evidence before the courts must be broadened and evolve towards an approach that considers documentation as policy, treats law as a binding lens as much as a solution, insists that empowerment projects be refocused on local knowledge and grassroots priorities, and recognizes that various forms of harm do not clearly translate into categories of evidence.
It is also necessary to reconsider what constitutes expertise, to include the vernacular medico-legal practices of families and the embodied work of research, mapping, and endurance.
Unless we change our conception of justice, we will continue to miss many things.
The authors do not work for, advise, hold shares in, or receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and have declared no affiliations other than their research institution.
–ref. More evidence, but not more justice: the limits of visual technologies in human rights cases –https://theconversation.com/more-evidence-but-not-more-justice-the-limitations-of-visual-technologies-in-human-rights-cases-279422