Advancing accountability for human rights violations through citizen media - an African perspective

Abstract

In the year 2020, there were two key events that captured global attention and further reinforced the power of citizen media evidence in exposing the truth and advancing justice. The first was the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States of America that was filmed by witnesses and disseminated via social media, while the second was the Lekki Toll Gate shooting carried out by Nigerian security forces against unarmed protesters in Lagos, Nigeria which was livestreamed on Instagram. The citizen videos from these two incidents sparked global outrage, triggered investigations and, in the George Floyd case, led to court convictions. However, these examples of citizen media evidence exposing atrocities are not isolated cases, neither are they new. The ubiquity of cellphone cameras combined with the popular adoption of social media networks have radically transformed the sphere of human rights in an unprecedented way, resulting in more people documenting and exposing human rights abuses. This proliferation of citizen media evidence has enabled victims of atrocities to obtain remedy and hold the powerful to account. At the same time, leveraging citizen media evidence to achieve justice is persistently being hindered by significant legal, social, political, technological and institutional barriers. This thesis is therefore an attempt to interrogate these barriers impeding the widespread use of citizen media evidence before domestic and international judicial mechanisms. This thesis engaged in an analysis of select African judicial systems, while also drawing lessons from international courts and tribunals as well as other domestic courts around the world. A socio-legal approach was adopted, through which the research was able to identify and isolate complex societal challenges and the role law can play in transforming the situation for the better. A key finding of this research is that in a number of African countries, the law of evidence is not sufficiently robust to meet the challenges of the digital era. I therefore proposed a model law on citizen media evidence as one of the ways to ensure that evidence of human rights violations can continue to be used in ways that protect the vulnerable, deliver justice for victims, and prosecute perpetrators and offenders. The analysis of African case law and statutory provisions that underpinned sections of this thesis constitute original contribution to a field of research that rarely centers experiences from the Global South, especially those on the African continent.