Publications
Proving International Crimes
In this book (published September 2024), TRUE PI Yvonne McDermott provides a comprehensive account of the law and practice of evidence before international criminal courts and tribunals. She argues for the development of a coherent framework for proving international crimes driven the highest standards of fairness.
Open-source imagery is transforming investigations of international crimes – but how do judges know if it’s real?
In this piece for The Conversation, TRUE PI Yvonne McDermott, Advisory Board member Alexa Koenig and Sarah Zarmsky set out the key lessons from our guide for judges.
Old Doubts, New Doubts: Evaluating Digital Open Source Imagery in the Courtroom
Writing on the Opinio Juris blog, TRUE PI Yvonne McDermott, together with Basile Simon and Stephen Sharp Queener of Stanford University explore the evidentiary challenges of digital open source imagery evidence, both old and new.
Truth, Trust, and AI: Justice and Accountability for International Crimes in the Era of Digital Deception
In this piece for Just Security, Yvonne and Advisory Board member Raquel Vazquez Llorente explore how deepfakes and synthetic media could impact accountability for human rights violations, based on the work of the TRUE project and WITNESS.
Trust in Evidence in an Era of Deepfakes
Writing for the Academy of Social Sciences blog, TRUE PhD students Rebecca Jenkins, Ruben Lamers-James and Anne Hausknecht discuss their research on the TRUE project and set out policy recommendations for improving awareness of deepfakes and their potential impact.
Putting Principles into Practice: Reflections on a Mock Admissibility Hearing on Open Source Evidence
In this new paper, TRUE's PI Yvonne McDermott Rees and colleagues from the Global Legal Action Network present the results of a mock admissibility hearing on open source evidence held in 2021. The chapter is forthcoming in the book International Law in Domestic Courts, co-edited by TRUE Affiliated Researcher Konstantina Stavrou. The mock admissibility hearing is available online in full here.
Drawing Conclusions: Representing and Evaluating Competing Explanations
In this new paper, TRUE's post-doctoral research associate Alice Liefgreen and Advisory Board member David Lagnado assess how competing explanations of the same evidence are structured, evaluated and compared in the context of legal scenarios. Findings show that when people evaluate competing legal accounts of the same evidence, their explanatory preferences for simplicity versus complexity are affected by whether they are required to draw causal models of the explanations.
Mapping the Use of Open Source Research in UN Human Rights Investigations
In this article, TRUE's PI Yvonne McDermott, writing with colleagues Daragh Murray and Alexa Koenig in the Journal of Human Rights Practice, provides a thorough analysis of how open source information is used in practice by UN human rights fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry and other official human rights investigations.
Factors affecting conspiracy theory endorsement in paranoia
Co-authored by TRUE post-doctoral research associate, Alice Liefgreen, this paper tested if endorsement of items on a new Components of Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire varied according to whether harm was described as being (a) intentional and (b) self-referential. It found that paranoia was positively associated with endorsement of items on this questionnaire overall and more paranoid individuals were more likely to endorse items describing intentional and self-referential harm.
Open Source Information’s Blind Spot: Human and Machine Bias in International Criminal Investigations
At a time when the use of digital open source information is becoming more widespread, this article warns of the cognitive and technical biases that can impact upon two key stages of an investigation: finding relevant information and analysing that information.