From Berlin, Students Verify Evidence for Major Human Rights Reports on Iran and U.S. Campuses

Footage of tear gas on American campuses. Videos from Iran's protests in 2022. Students in Bard College Berlin's Digital Verification Corps (DVC) team examined both, working to establish where and when clips were recorded and whether they could be trusted. Their work now forms part of two major human rights reports.

The first, Student Speech Under Attack, published by the ACLU and Amnesty International USA, examines how some U.S. colleges and police responded to campus protests over Israel's conduct in Gaza. BCB students helped to verify photos, videos, and social media posts from 20 schools. At 17 of them, the material described or showed chemical irritants used against students.

The second, Amnesty International's Architects of Atrocities, runs to more than 1,000 pages and concludes that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity to crush the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. DVC teams reviewed more than 2,000 videos from the protests.

"Knowing how to tell what's real from what's not is one of the most important skills in human rights work, and these students are already doing this on some of the key issues of our time," said Fred Abrahams, guest faculty member at BCB and manager of the BCB DVC. 

BCB students have previously contributed to investigations of Russian drone attacks on civilians in Ukraine (Human Rights Watch) and unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza (Amnesty International).

Coordinated by Amnesty International, the DVC trains students at nine universities in open source research and then connects them with research projects by NGOs, UN bodies, media, and others. In addition to BCB, the network includes the Hertie School of Governance, Technical University Berlin, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, University of Essex, University of Pretoria, Ibero-American University (Mexico), and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Post Date: 10-01-2026