Shubh Agarwal | November 12, 2025
Introduction
The pursuit of international justice has been shaped by the nature of available evidence. In the aftermath of World War II, German records and witness affidavits formed the primary evidentiary basis for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. This approach came to be known as the “Nuremberg era” of paper trials.
In contemporary times, armed conflict unfolds with a fundamental change in the nature of evidence. In the Russia-Ukraine war and the ongoing hostilities in Gaza, alleged violations of international humanitarian law are recorded in real time by civilians using smartphones, journalists operating digital platforms, satellites capturing high-resolution imagery, and investigators analysing open-source intelligence (OSINT) within hours of an incident. Digital material has become central and frequently outcome-determinative in legal discourse.
The issue that arises is that the development of legal safeguards cannot match this evidentiary shift. Unlike traditional proof, digital evidence is highly vulnerable to manipulation, metadata loss, selective deletion, platform takedowns, and algorithmic distortion. While international bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, have accepted digital material as legally relevant, the increasing reliance on algorithmic and AI-assisted systems raises transparency and accuracy concerns. This produces an “evidentiary paradox” with more data but less certainty about its legal admissibility and reliability.
Defining the Digital Corpus
The modern landscape of armed conflict, known as “digital corpus” consists of three main categories of digital material. First, User-Generated Content, which includes multimedia posts created by civilians, journalists, and combatants using personal devices. It often captures events in real time and provides ground-level perspectives, but it is easily altered or removed. Second, remotely sensed data, which includes satellite and drone imagery, provides high-resolution, wide-area views to verify attacks, troop movements, and destruction. Third, OSINT refers to the systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information, integrating UGC and remotely sensed data into structured investigative findings.
The “end users” of this corpus include ordinary individuals, the International Criminal Court (ICC), UN Commissions of Inquiry, and non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which rely on these data streams to identify patterns of violations and support efforts toward international accountability.
Comparative Turning Points: Gaza and Ukraine
The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza mark two contrasting but interconnected turning points in the use of digital evidence in contemporary armed conflict. Together, they reveal systemic instability in how international legal institutions assess, preserve, and rely on digital truth.
Ukraine represents a case of unprecedented over-documentation. Since 2022, vast quantities of digital material like civilian videos, satellite imagery, intercepted communications and social media content have been collected and analyzed by states, journalists, and civil society actors. Investigative NGOs such as Bellingcat have played a central role in bridging journalism and legal evidence by institutionalizing OSINT. Using geolocation, chronolocation, metadata verification, and chain-of-custody protocols, open-source material has become evidence capable of meeting judicial standards.
The legal credibility of this approach was reinforced by the ECHR in Ukraine v. Russia, where the Grand Chamber accepted large volumes of digital and open-source evidence as “credible and serious,” rejecting arguments that such material was inherently unreliable. Yet this case reveals fragility of digital truth as Russian disinformation strategies, including the circulation of deepfakes, most notably the fabricated 2022 video depicting President Zelensky’s surrender, demonstrate how manipulated media can be used to generate reasonable doubt, even where evidentiary records are otherwise strong.
By contrast, Gaza is defined by an acute access vacuum. With international investigators and journalists excluded, accountability efforts rely heavily on civilian-recorded videos shared and encrypted on social media platforms. While indispensable, repeated sharing often removes metadata, complicating authentication and weakening the chain of custody.
These challenges are intensified by platform erasure. Content moderation practices by companies such as Meta and X frequently result in the removal of violent content that may simultaneously constitute evidence of war crimes. The seriousness of this risk was acknowledged by the International Court of Justice in South Africa v. Israel (Provisional Measures, 2024), where the Court expressly ordered the preservation of evidence relating to alleged violations.
Together, Ukraine and Gaza reveal a systemic instability in digital evidence regimes. In Ukraine, truth risks being undermined by synthetic doubt; in Gaza, it risks being erased by technical and corporate processes. Both expose the absence of harmonised reliability standards, leaving international justice vulnerable to disinformation and evidentiary decay.
The Anatomy of Reliability
The key distinction between authenticity and integrity is central to digital evidence debates. Authenticity asks whether the events occurred, while integrity concerns ask whether the file remained unchanged from capture to courtroom. A video may be authentic in content but lack integrity if altered or stripped of metadata, as seen in conflicts like Gaza and Ukraine. For example, footage of rocket strikes in Kharkiv on 28 February 2022 may depict real events, yet loses integrity if altered during transfer via platforms/social media.
In today’s modern age, the mere existence of generative AI manipulation tools, such as deepfakes, may allow attackers an effective shield. States can now dismiss authentic footage as AI-generated or made without providing counterproof. Scholars describe this technical fault as “Liars’ Dividend.” For example, in the Bucha killings, Russia dismissed independently verified civilian death footage as staged, alleging digital fabrication without forensic proof. As a result, victims must not only demonstrate that a crime occurred but also provide mathematical evidence that an algorithm did not generate it.
These challenges worsen due to institutional fragmentation. The International Criminal Court imposes strict requirements in adherence to the Berkeley Protocol. Contrarily, the UN Commission of Inquiry relies on reasonable grounds, where evidence is acquired using illegal means, a more flexible strategy. This gap creates a “justice hierarchy” whereby evidence that is featured in a UN report may be considered invisible in a criminal courtroom. For instance, Gaza strike videos may satisfy the UN commission’s “reasonable grounds” standards, but fail before the ICC due to a broken chain of custody or missing metadata.
A Proposed Four-Pillar Reliability Framework
A strong dependability framework must shift the emphasis from modern technology to a systematic discipline, relying on the Berkeley and Minnesota Protocols, post-Ukraine case law, and the evidential flaws revealed in Gaza. The 4-Pillar Reliability Framework works best in structuring stabilized digital evidence.
Pillar I: Authenticity and Traceability
The first pillar requires investigators to extract a technical “passport” of the file. The investigators need to move beyond the visual content to verify metadata and assign a cryptographic hash. Although hashing does not prove the substantive truth of a video, it produces a permanent digital seal that allows courts to distinguish between original footage and modified or re-uploaded versions.
Pillar II: Integrity Safeguards
Authenticity and integrity are established by procedural openness, and with a documented digital chain of custody. Every stage of transfer, compression, and analysis must be documented; the solution is documentation, not exclusion. Both Protocols demonstrate how courts accept digital evidence based on internally consistent reconstruction and a clear digital chain of custody, putting methodological integrity ahead of technological perfection.
Pillar III: Multi-Source Corroborations
This pillar introduces the essential practice of verifying information by cross-referencing details across several independent sources. The Rule of 2 states that no single digital artefact should be outcome-determinative. For example, a video of a school’s destruction in Gaza, both the “over-documentation” situation in Ukraine and the access-restricted environment in Gaza, where individual files are weak but cumulative consistency is strong, have benefited greatly from this strategy.
Pillar IV: Methodology Transparency
Finally, the foundation of the system’s legitimacy is transparency. Investigators must open the black box, regardless of whether they use AI-assisted processing. This immediately addresses the opacity of military AI systems reported by Human Rights Watch and the fair-trial issues noted in ICC studies. Like in Article 13 of the European Securities and Markets Authority, which mandates full transparency for financial data, the same standard should apply to forensic data to protect lives and fair trial rights.
Nuances, Limitations and the Power Imbalance
The rise in reliability standards without contextual sensitivity creates a risk for the digital divides in international justice. Under the Berkley Protocols, advanced forensic verification or metadata may be excluded from global south conflicts where preservation of resources is scarce. Therefore, to prevent silenced victims, the UN commission’s inquiry on Gaza relied on anonymous civilian footage.
Conclusion
The post-Gaza and Ukraine conflict era shows how digital evidence plays a fundamental role in the foundation of international accountability. What remains absent in all of these is the harmonized framework, which can help in stabilizing trust for digital truth across institutions. Therefore, to harmonize the requirements on authenticity, integrity, corroboration, and methodological transparency across courts, commissions, and investigative bodies, this paper calls for an International Digital Evidence Protocol, building upon the Berkeley Protocol. Such a union is necessary to avoid institutional separation, disinformation, and exclusion. In the end, trustworthy digital evidence is a requirement for the rule of law in armed conflict in the twenty-first century, not just a matter of technology.