Syria Tracker is a crisis mapping platform which collates and exhibits live data on human rights abuses and other welfare issues brought about by the Syrian conflict. Reports of killings, rapes, water and food tampering, and chemical attacks ongoing in Syria are geolocated and collated onto a live map by US-based volunteers.
Syria Tracker synthesises two pre-existing data-sourcing platforms: Harvard University’s Healthmap, which mines online sources to monitor disease outbreaks; and the crowdsourcing tool Ushahidi, originally built in 2008 to monitor post-election violence in Kenya.
The combination makes for meticulous accuracy, since data from one source is triangulated with the other, and unverified information is discarded – the volunteers behind Syria Tracker estimate that they only use 6 per cent of on-the-ground reports received. The news-tracking tool covers anti- and pro-Assad news sources to reduce potential bias.
The bloody conflict between the Syrian government and opposition groups, sparked by the 2011 protests across the Arab world and reignited in 2014 by the advance of IS, has made the country one of the deadliest in the world for journalists, with one of the worst records for free press. Syria Tracker’s founders encourage its civilian reporters to contribute anonymously, using encryption software such as Tor.
It uses a combination of user-generated reports, photos and videos – more than 80,000 of which have been sent to Syria Tracker since the conflict broke out in 2011 – and computer-aggregated data. The tool has digitally mined 180,000 articles from 2,000 news sources, and has also searched through more than 80 million tweets.
The map aims to provide Syrians and external relief-providers with a holistic depiction of the conflict, which is more accurate and up-to-date than traditional news sources are able to supply. In early 2014, for example, Syria Tracker warned of an outbreak of polio days before other news outlets, thanks to early civilian reports.
By assembling otherwise diverse data, the map has also illustrated developing trends in the country’s violent fighting. For example, in 2014 Syria Tracker showed a rise in the percentage of total deaths which were of women or children, indicating a rise in civilian targeting.
“It’s such a great honour to be nominated for the award,” said Taha Kass-Hout, founder of Syria Tracker, in a recent interview with Index on Censorship. “It shows that those voices on the ground that are sharing with the rest of the world are not going unheard. It shows them that the data that they are sharing means something,”
A coalition of international press freedom organisations has hit out at a move to force some Russian “government-controlled” TV stations off Lithuanian airwaves.
Lithuania’s Committee on Radio and Television is reportedly considering, at the request of the government, to ban two Russian television channels from broadcasting to the Baltic country.
“If a ban is imposed on the whole channel due to repeated violations, I believe it should be longer … I believe it should be up to one year,” Vaitiekunas added in comments to the Baltic News Service earlier this year.
Russian state-owned media such as RT (formerly Russia Today), has come under fire for alleged distortion of facts in the their coverage, especially in relation to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
In a letter this week to the Lithuanian President, media freedom organisations including the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the World Press Freedom Committee, argued that while they understand the objection to certain Russian broadcasts in “the current tense situation”, they consider a ban to be counterproductive and in contradiction of international free speech standards.
“If put into effect, bans on broadcasts across frontiers would almost inevitably be seized upon by the Russian authorities to justify bans on broadcasts by independent news media from other countries,” the letter states.
“It is an established conviction in free societies that the best answer to bad speech is more speech. We can see from the reaction to recent events in Moscow that there is a large public that is open to arguments, news reports and information to counteract official propaganda. The risk should not be taken to cut off such audiences from the free flow of information from outside their borders,” the group added.
Valor por Tamaulipas is a crowd-sourced news platform, based in Mexico and set up in 2012 to fill the void created by the region’s cartel-induced media blackout.
Valor’s online followers – more than half a million on Facebook and 125,000 on Twitter – send in reports of cartel-related violence, such as shootings, robberies, or missing people. These reports are immediately curated and disseminated by the page administrator, with a hashtag such as #SDR (situación de riesgo ie “situation of risk”) attached.
From its inception, Valor por Tamaulipas (which means Courage for Tamaulipas) has been under constant threat by cartels. In 2013 leaflets were distributed throughout the state offering 600,000 pesos (~£25,000) to anyone with information on the page’s management. This prompted Valor’s administrator – whose identity has always been a closely kept secret – to temporarily suspend activities and relocate their family to the US.
A representative from Valor por Tamaulipas told Index, “The nomination is important for people in the state of Tamaulipas, and for those who see this community as a dependable way of showing what criminals and corrupt authorities are doing.”
The Mexican government is also criticised for trying to cover-up the extent of the situation and seeking to present a more positive image to the outside world. As a result, citizens of this state have looked increasingly to social media channels and blogs, which may have flaws and bias, but professional journalism is severely restricted to the point of near blackout.
“The principle motivation is to give citizens a voice, and other objectives arise from here – such as spreading the word on missing people, on the modus operandi of criminals, on corrupt authorities and on current ‘risk situations’, so people know about insecurity in certain areas,” added the representative.
“The community is also a space for those from small or rural areas; crimes that happen there are equally despicable, but people who live there have an disadvantage as there are less people who share and retweet information.”
María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, co-administrator of a similar page Esperanza por Tamaulipas, was kidnapped and murdered by cartel members in October 2014. Rubio had frequently shared up-to-date information about violent incidents in Tamaulipas to her thousands of Twitter followers, using an anonymous Twitter handle. Her killers used her Twitter account to reveal her identity, post her “confession”, and give warnings to other Valor administrators to keep silent. They also posted pictures of her dead body.
Rubio’s death temporarily halted activity at Valor por Tamaulipas, and in November the administrator suggested that control of the pages would be transferred to someone associated with the authorities. But after complaints from followers that the page’s content would suffer, the previous anonymous administrator has taken charge of the page once again, and has been posting dozens of alerts each day since.
Under the famous ceiling of room XX created by Miquel Barcel in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the on-going session of the Council is no different. Some of those unnoticed statements deserve our attention.
One in particular.
On Thursday, 5 March, one of the United Nations’ chief human rights voices, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, presented his first annual report to the council. It is his first since he took up the position of high commissioner for human rights in September 2014. From terrorism, torture and harassment of human rights defenders to the reorganisation of his office, the high commissioner’s report aims at presenting the state of human rights, the major threats against them and how he aims at building up his office to face those realities.
Al Hussein’s mandate, which Norway at the council called “an authoritative voice on human rights, built on […] repeated confirmation of its independence,” is what the Russian Federation in fact wants to silence.
Russia, which is today one of the 47 members of the council, was infuriated at the high commissioner’s statement presenting his report. It is traditional for states mentioned by international human rights mechanisms to accuse such instruments for being politicised and obeying “double standards.”
Russia went a step further by “condemning the high commissioner’s attempts to stigmatise any states for their acts or omissions in the field of human rights, even if they indeed took place.” Russia does not refer to politicisation or to attention the high commissioner would be giving to situations in certain countries only, but instead calls upon the United Nations voice for human rights to stop mentioning any country all together, whatever human rights violation took place in the country. In fact, Russia calls for the high commissioner to be silent.
Such a statement should not remain unnoticed because it sheds light on how Russia sees the international system; not one of standards and principles challenging states but rather one of obedience and muteness serving the states. The challenge Russia is facing with the high commissioner’s report is in fact a reflection of its disrespect for international law, be it in the way it has led suppression of civil society at home or its military activities in Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.
Because we must applaud those who stand firm for rights, we must also make sure that declarations by states who aim at silencing them do not go unnoticed. This one in particular.
