The Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, together with Amnesty International, hosted a training session in which students were exposed to the world of digital verification.

The purpose of the training was to introduce online verification to a multi-disciplinary group of students. These students will become part of a global team assisting researchers at Amnesty International to advance accountability for human rights violations.

The training session involved both theory and practice. Participants learned how to identify false online posts and to verify authenticity. These are valuable skills in a digital era where retweets and reposts of unverified news can cause irreparable harm and stoke the fires of conflict.

The Centre for Human Rights has been a part of the Digital Verification Corps (DVC) since its inception in 2016 and the University of Pretoria is the only African university on the DVC.

The DVC team of the University of Pretoria started with seven volunteers, and has been part of investigations into the crisis in Syria, the election monitoring in Kenya, and the human rights violations in Southern Cameroon.

Other universities that are a part of the DVC network include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Essex; the University of Toronto; the University of Cambridge and the University of Hong Kong.

Student volunteers from the six universities deploy technology to investigate human rights abuses perpetrated by state and non-state actors.

If you are interested in being trained in digital verification or becoming a part of the UP team, please contact:

Adebayo Okeowo

Advocacy Coordinator

Centre for Human Rights

[email protected]