Reporter’s guide to investigating war crimes: Attacks on civilians

This post is the second installment from GIJN’s Reporter’s Guide to Investigating War Crimes. The first part of the series, on open source research, has already been published. The guide will be released in full this September at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. Original photos by Ron Haviv and John Stanmeyer are courtesy of the nonprofit VII Foundation. 

Journalists are key witnesses to atrocities committed against civilians. Without their eyes and presence on the ground, the barbarity of wars would probably go unnoticed.

Nailing down who did what to whom, where, when and how are the basic questions journalists would naturally ask. This is true whether one is covering international armed conflicts where more than one state is involved, or non-international conflicts like civil wars, which can both result in deaths or injuries of civilians, displacement, and destruction of infrastructure or medical facilities.

Click here to read more.