Human Rights Groups Say New Technology Helping Their Work

Technology is transforming our lives. It's also transforming the way non-profit groups police human rights abuses around the world. Pictures taken from high in the skies are revealing gruesome stories -- as human rights organizations monitor the action from thousands of kilometers away.

In 2001, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan, aimed at toppling the Taliban.  

U.S-supported troops from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance joined the fight.  
 
The group Physicians for Human Rights says it discovered this mass grave of 2,000 Taliban troops. It believes they were killed by the Northern Alliance.  

But the group's Susannah Sirkin claims when it pursued an investigation, new satellite images confirmed their worst fears. "So when the satellite image came and we actually see the picture of the truck on the ground on that particular day, which means there wasn't clouds overhead and we have this clear image of what looks like an enormous excavator, it wasn't really shocking to us," she says, "But it confirmed what we had suspected, and now we had the proof that someone had ordered a big machine to remove probably bodies."

'Eyes on Darfur' monitors satellite images and compare them with previous imagesIn Darfur, genocide takes place as militias destroy villages. These are remote areas, difficult to reach because of restrictions imposed by Sudan's government.

But because of an effort called Eyes on Darfur, the world can now monitor a dozen villages at risk.

Scientist Susan Wolfinbarger explains how satellite images reveal areas that have been attacked. "There's large burn scars. You can tell. There will be ash rings where fences have burned down and the ash is a lighter color, they correspond exactly to the areas where there were buildings and where there were fences in the before imagery," she said.

This satellite technology is revolutionizing the way human rights groups uncover abuses. But there are challenges. They can be expensive. Remote villages often do not appear on maps or the government does not allow cartography of the region.
 
The Center for American Progress says the U.S. should upgrade the mapping database that's available to the public.

It also wants the government to notify human rights groups when it purchases images, so the groups can access them at a lower price.

New images cost $2,000, compared to $200 to order a duplicate.  

But these groups agree, the real work comes after the photos are released.

"It's only one tool," Sirkin says, "And at the end of the day, it's human beings and governments and citizens of the world that have to decide how to stop these things and how to punish perpetrators."

And, that, she says, is the greater challenge.