In 2020, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley released the preliminary version of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations: the world's first guidelines for using online information to investigate violations of international criminal, humanitarian and human rights law.

Since then, the protocol has been released in all of the official languages of the United Nations and has supported investigations in contexts as diverse as Ukraine, Myanmar, Mali, Palestine and more. In this talk, Alexa Koenig will discuss the protocol's background, including the global input that led to its publication and how it is currently being operationalised by practitioners around the world.

Speaker: Professor Alexa Koenig

Professor Alexa Koenig is co-director of UC Berkeley’s MacArthur Award-Winning Human Rights Center and a Research Professor at Berkeley Law. She directs the centre’s Investigations Programme, co-founded and directs UC Berkeley’s Investigations Lab, and trains journalists and war crimes investigators around the world in digital open source research methods.

In addition to directing the development of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, Alexa helped establish and co-chaired the Technology Advisory Board for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; is an advisory board member of Physicians for Human Rights; and co-chaired the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Law Committee, among other posts. She has been recognised with the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, as a “Woman Inspiring Change” by Harvard Law School, and as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” among other honours.

Her latest books are Digital Witness (Oxford University Press 2020 with Sam Dubberley and Daragh Murray, expanded version forthcoming 2026) and Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in our Online Lives (Cambridge University Press 2023).

Chair: Dr Maria Varaki

Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Before moving to London, she held research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and at the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor of International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Maria holds a PhD in International Law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland and two LLM degrees in International and Comparative Law from Tulane University and New York University School of Law. She is currently a Research Associate on the Three Generations of Digital Human Rights ERC project (2023-2028) at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law.