The Foreign Affairs article highlighted the limitations of international legal systems in trying the crime of aggression since the international avenues for trying this crime are less clear than the jurisdiction of the ICC for example. After the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were disbanded, no international court had jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. This article demonstrates two key points for me. The first is the limitation of international legal systems. The crime of aggression cannot be applied against nationals of nonparties due to the concession made at Kampala. One alternative workaround mentioned in the article is for a few states to create an ad hoc court (or for the crime to be tried domestically in Ukraine), which can both be very long processes that take a lot of time. The second and related key point is that the role of journalism is in some ways to be “faster” than the legal system by documenting and gathering evidence of war crimes and aggression as they occur in real time. In other words, it’s an additional form of accountability which should not “wait” for the long and drawn out legal processes.

Citizen journalism and open-source investigations can contribute to this goal. For example, the TIME article on Ukraine crowdsourcing digital evidence of war crimes is a good example of allowing citizens to document alleged war crimes so that authorities can later hold the perpetrators responsible. It helps that Ukraine adapted already widely-used government apps for this purpose, and that there is an organized effort to gather this information into one database. The article notes that international war crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, so it’s still unclear what the effect of these efforts will be in terms of prosecution. However, these documentation efforts are still useful on their own in terms of countering potential Russian misinformation about what’s happening on the ground, as noted by a Ukrainian officials defending the use of these digital tools. The Record’s article also demonstrates that use of newer tools can help answer questions that were previously either impossible or very difficult to answer when it comes to investigating mass graves. It also suggests that mass surveillance changed from being something that was solely in the purview of governments to something that is more open-source due to the digital era.

Bellingcat’s investigation into the downing of Malaysia airlines flight MH17 over Ukrainian airspace is great example of open source investigations being “ahead” of legal processes while helping with the conviction years down the line. As of the time of publication of The Record article, there was still no verdict on the case of the three Russians and Ukrainian accused of downing the plane. However, a verdict did come later that year. Although it took more than eight years between the incident and the verdict, there is no doubt that Bellingcat’s effort of looking through social media posts in eastern Ukraine and eventually finding intercepted calls helped make this verdict possible or at least faster than it might have been without the open source investigation.