IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 82

regime's planning and staging of crimes against humanity. A primary purpose is to gather information for international intervention, but also to serve as evidence
gathering and individual deterrents for those who are in
a position to be a part of the execution of planned
atrocities. Humanitarian cyber operations enables a
faster response, allows retrieval of information necessary for the world community's decision making to
occur, and removes the secrecy surrounding the perpetrated acts of totalitarian and repressive regimes.
If a state fails to protect the welfare of its citizens,
then states that commit atrocities against their own
populations are no longer protected from foreign intervention. Traditionally interventions have utilized military units to intercept the preparation and execution of
crimes against humanity. Since the end of the Thirty
Year War, and the peace of Westphalia 1648, where
states were given the protection of foreign intervention
in domestic matters, until recent decades states were
guaranteed from other states that there would be no
intervention in domestic matters. After the Second
World War, and the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, there was a gradual codification and consolidation of treaties and international and national laws
related to crimes against humanity. These have created a well-establish presence and legal foundation for
what constitutes crimes against humanity and grounds
for prosecution. After the failure to protect the population in former Yugoslavia from atrocities, and the delay
in reacting to the genocide in Rwanda, there was a
reaction and a responsibility to respond concept developed within the United Nations and the international
community.
According to United Nations [1], responsibility to protect can be summarized as:
Sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States
from foreign interference; it is a charge of responsibility that holds States accountable for the welfare of their people.
Responsibility to protect not only enables foreign
states to intervene in the domestic affairs of a repressive regime, it is a moral and humanitarian obligation to
act. The initial goal is to prevent atrocities, then intercept and hinder further crimes, and if that fails apprehend the perpetrators to be brought to justice
supported by international humanitarian law.

Crimes Against Humanity on Trial
The main weakness in the prosecution of crimes
against humanity is finding evidence that meets the
standards of criminal litigation, where the threshold
being that evidence supporting the prosecutor's claim

of the defendant's criminal actions is valid and erases
any reasonable doubt that the perpetrator perpetrated
these crimes. Those who perpetrated crimes against
humanity are given a competent defense team, who will
examine any evidence and scrutinize its relevance and
validity. This will then require a dedicated effort to prosecute, collect evidence, secure evidence, and ensure a
fair trial. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was organized by the United Nations in
1993 with the jurisdiction determined as:
...an international tribunal shall be established for
the prosecution of persons responsible for serious
violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia
since 1991.
The international tribunal that existed from 1993
expected to have complete all litigation by 2015. During
these years charges have been brought against 161
defendants. The tribunal employs 900 staff members.
The 900 employees include only the actual staff at the
court in the Netherlands; the numerous United Nations,
NATO, and national staff in the Balkan region who support the work of the court are not included. The size of
tribunal shows the level of resources needed to bring
161 defendants to justice. Digital evidence secured by
humanitarian cyber operations could support future litigation and minimize the time consuming and labor
intensive traditional evidence gathering.
Noteworthy is that even once the court was created,
it still did not serve as a deterrent against atrocities. The
massacre after the fall of the town Srebrenica occurred
after the tribunal was created. If there is no linkage
between the event, the actions, and the defendant that
can be evidenced beyond any reasonable doubt, then
upholding international humanitarian law fails. And it
should rightly fail, because otherwise our war crime
judges would sentence defendants based on assumptions and hearsay, making the court proceedings arbitrary and denying the defendant a fair trial.
The pivotal question in upholding international
humanitarian law is, how is high quality evidence
secured?

Limited Evidence
In a civil war, revolutionary change of government, or
societal chaos that is the surrounding environment to
these atrocities, documents are lost. A major reason for
the success of the Nuremberg Trial of the leaders of
Nazi Germany was that Nazi Germany had maintained
numerous records and paper trails of the perpetrated
events [2]. The Holocaust was well documented in the
records retrieved by the Allied Forces after the collapse

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september 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016