Books - Mahmoud Al-Shaboul
The Witness Foundation has launched a new guide on how to use video as evidence for defending the environment. This guide is a tool to provide support and assistance to those interested in environmental issues and to help collect evidence about violations committed against the environment, especially in the Middle East and North Africa region. Investigative journalists working on investigations documenting environmental violations can also Activists, lawyers, and local community leaders in areas witnessing violations of environmental rights can use this guide in the documentation process and collect evidence in a safe manner via mobile phones, cameras, or drones. The guide also provides training on collecting visual evidence in a reliable and safer manner.
The guide targets the areas most used for extractive industries, which use oil, gas, hydropower, mining, etc., which cause major environmental pollution, destruction of natural resources, and severe damage to means of life and livelihoods, which negatively affects the residents of these areas.
The issuance of this guide comes to enhance collective action to confront these risks, to assist defenders of the land and the environment, and to contribute as a means of pressure on decision-makers to issue laws, regulations and policies that guarantee the preservation of natural resources and reduce the negative effects resulting from the indiscriminate use of extractive industries, in light of the importance of using visual means and their profound impact as a guide to defense. About the environment.
The guide, which a group of specialists worked on, contains a complete series that enables the user to collect video evidence from the field, how to use it legally, and how to prepare, save and archive documents. It includes a definition of environmental human rights violations and crimes and how to prove them, methods for photographing crime scenes and areas of violation, and how to photograph large areas of violation. The main principles for filming preliminary interviews as well as dealing with documentation injuries.
This guide, which was issued by the Witness Foundation in several languages, including Arabic, French, English, and Portuguese, in cooperation with a number of institutions concerned with environmental issues, is considered one of a series of diverse guides included in its resource library for defending human rights issues.
The guide can be downloaded through this Link.
