News and Events

27 Nov WITNESS and AfrOrigens project Launch Underwater Filming Guide

News and Events | WITNESS

In November, WITNESS and partners in Brazil launched new guidance on collecting underwater audiovisual evidence, aiming to strengthen community efforts to protect their territories, defend their rights, and preserve historical memory. Available in Portuguese and English, the Underwater Filming Guide brings together technical instructions and practical recommendations to support communities and research groups working to document submerged environments.  The guide outlines methods for planning safe dives, producing stable footage, and capturing relevant scenes for advocacy, environmental monitoring, and historical investigation. For those documenting underwater environments for the first time, it offers step-by-step guidance on advance planning, safe practices before and during water entry, attention to currents and weather conditions, and recommendations for preserving collected footage. According to Natalie Hornos, Program Manager at WITNESS, the launch of the guide in partnership with AfrOrigens is an important step in supporting the investigation of environmental crimes, the documentation of violations, the recording of historical events, and the strengthening of community knowledge about aquatic ecosystems. “Images produced over time are powerful records for revealing stories that have been erased. That’s why we support documentation methods and initiatives that strengthen struggles for justice and reinforce the defense of traditional territories,” Hornos says. With increasing environmental

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14 Nov WITNESS calls on India to develop an innovative, interoperable and effective AI Transparency regulations

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

On November 6, WITNESS submitted comments to the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology (MeitY) in response to the Draft IT Amendment Rules “in relation to synthetically generated information”.  WITNESS welcomes the government’s recognition of the growing impact of AI-generated content. However, we caution that the proposed framework remains too broad and platform-centric to achieve genuine transparency or accountability.  This current amendment provides the potential for over-broad content takedowns that could stifle freedom of expression, arts, satire, and journalism. Drawing on nearly a decade of work at the intersection of AI transparency, detection, provenance, and human rights, WITNESS believes India can lead globally by creating a dedicated, risk-based AI Transparency Framework aligned with international best practices. Effective governance must move beyond simplistic “AI or not-AI” binaries and instead focus on how content is created, disclosed, and used. The goal should be process transparency, not punitive or reactive content moderation. WITNESS Executive Director Sam Gregory notes:  “We cannot regulate AI by only regulating intermediaries; we must build the infrastructure of trust through transparency, provenance and accountability through every stage of the AI pipeline.”  We also echo the perspective of India’s leading digital rights organization, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), which has

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13 Nov WITNESS joins open letter urging EU to stop plans that could weaken digital rights protections

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

This week, WITNESS joined 127 civil society organizations, trade unions, and public interest advocates in signing an open letter urging the European Commission to halt plans that could weaken core digital rights protections in Europe. The proposal, known as the Digital Omnibus or Digital Package on Simplification, seeks to review and “streamline” existing EU digital laws, but could in fact roll back essential safeguards for privacy and accountability online. Among the laws at risk are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which ensures people have control over their personal data, the ePrivacy framework, which protects online communications from intrusive tracking, and the AI Act, the EU’s first major law to regulate artificial intelligence and prevent harmful or discriminatory uses of the technology. As highlighted in WITNESS’ recent submission to the European Commission, simplification efforts should not come at the expense of human rights. WITNESS stands with partners across Europe in calling on the Commission to strengthen, not dismantle, these hard-won protections, ensuring that technology serves people, not power. The letter’s content is the following:  The EU must uphold hard-won protections for digital human rights  We 127 civil society organisations, trade unions and defenders of the public interest write to emphasise

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31 Oct Fortifying Community Truth: WITNESS Strengthens Local Journalism in East Africa

News and Events | WITNESS

In early October, WITNESS held the Fortifying Community Truth (FCT) project in Nairobi, Kenya, a three-day workshop that brought together 12 investigative journalists from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The gathering aimed to strengthen participants’ capacity to document, verify, and preserve audiovisual evidence in ways that defend their communities’ truths against denial and disinformation. The FCT initiative seeks to build the resilience of underrepresented communities by equipping local journalists and human rights defenders with the tools and skills to verify, analyze, and archive evidence that reflects their lived realities. The workshop in Nairobi offered an intensive, hands-on introduction to new video-based strategies, including geospatial analysis, data wrangling, open-source verification, and archiving. The goal was simple yet vital: to strengthen participants’ ability to source, gather, catalog, verify, and securely store evidence so it cannot be easily dismissed or denied. Selected from a pool of more than 50 applicants, each cohort member stood out for the clarity, creativity, and community focus of their project ideas. Their work tackles some of the region’s most pressing issues: Environmental injustice – from irresponsible mining to urban pollution State violence and gender-based violence, particularly around water bodies such as Lake Victoria

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European Parliament

30 Oct Navigating Human Rights in the EU AI Act: WITNESS’s Call for Thoughtful Transparency

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

In September, the European Commission began implementing Article 50 of the EU AI Act, the EU’s first comprehensive law regulating artificial intelligence, by launching a public consultation to draft guidelines and a Code of Practice (CoP) on AI transparency. The outcome will shape how AI tools, from chatbots and generative media to emotion-recognition, biometric categorization and deepfake technologies, inform users when they are interacting with or viewing AI-generated content. In its official submission, WITNESS called on the Commission to ensure that the forthcoming Transparency CoP reflects the complex, multimodal nature of generative AI and its impact on accessibility, privacy, and the potential for misuse by governments. For more than two decades, WITNESS has helped communities use video and technology to defend human rights. Over the past eight years, the organization has observed how artificial intelligence can both empower truth and amplify disinformation. WITNESS works to ensure that policies for transparency and disclosure around real and synthetic content are grounded in human rights and respond to the needs of critical frontline information actors like journalists and human rights defenders. Since 2020, WITNESS has also been actively involved in Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), shaping authenticity and provenance infrastructure so

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