| Human rights organizations seek methods with which to document abuses around the world. However, these abuses often occur in remote areas, dangerous locations, or may have occurred years in the past, making documentation a problematic endeavor. To combat these issues, human rights documentation efforts have increasingly included the use of remote sensing analysis. As awareness of the technical capabilities of remote sensing has spread, interest has grown in the application of the technology to advance human rights litigation as an additional component which may augment efforts to achieve redress for the victims of abuse. Remote sensing has the potential to provide additional evidence to bolster human rights abuse accounts, which tend to be qualitative in nature (e.g. witness testimony) and lend an additional layer of scientific objectivity. While remote sensing evidence for human rights litigation has, thus far, been limited to the use of high-resolution imagery analysis, I argue for the application of existing low- and moderate-resolution image analysis techniques as a way to further expand documentation capabilities. In order to do this, I use a framework which links feminist and critical views of geographic technology with digital evidentiary standards to establish a type of remote sensing methodology which maintains focus on the local people who are victims of abuse, although they are not 'visible' in the satellite imagery. I apply this framework to a particular human rights court case and use it to guide satellite imagery analysis in a way which does not lose the local context in favor of the abstraction found in lower-resolution imagery. This work presents an application of geographic skills which will become increasingly needed in the pursuance of human rights litigation. In addition, it advances geographic literature in the areas of mixed methods, counter-mapping, and feminist views of technology. The work has implications for the use of human rights litigation as the use of geographic technologies, such as remote sensing, are developed as a form of digital evidence. |
