We are delighted to invite you to our next GCILS event with Yvonne McDermott, Professor in Law at Swansea University.

Location: Room 207, 10 Professors’ Square

Time: 1.30pm, Thursday 15th February 2024

Registration: In-person attendance only. To attend, please register via Bookitbee. 

Tea and coffee will be provided.

Abstract

Information recorded by ordinary citizens on personal devices plays an increasingly important role in accountability processes. Across the world, advances in mobile phone technology and internet access mean that millions of important photographs and videos depicting mass human rights violations have been, and will continue to be, created and shared online. Yet, at the same time, the public is increasingly confronted with examples of deepfakes and synthetic media, which are only likely to become more widespread, advanced, and difficult to detect as the technology progresses. Much of the literature to date has expressed a concern that the rise in deepfakes will lead to mass mistrust in user-generated evidence, and that this in turn will decrease its epistemic value in legal proceedings and human rights accountability processes. This may well be the case, but no study has yet empirically tested that assumption. This lecture outlines some of the key findings to date from the TRUE project, a large multi-disciplinary project, which seeks to address this important evidence gap. 

About

Yvonne McDermott Rees is Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK. Yvonne is the author of, amongst others, Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Proving International Crimes (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is currently Principal Investigator on the TRUE project, a £1.2 million project selected for funding by the European Research Council and funded by UK Research and Innovation, which examines the impact of the rise of deepfakes on trust in user-generated evidence of human rights violations. Yvonne is a Legal Advisor to the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and a Master of the Bench of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.