Thread by @EliotHiggins

Over the years Bellingcat has become increasingly involved with the justice and accountability community, and what's become increasingly clear is how utterly detached most of the online debate about things like chemical weapon use in Syria are from the work of that community.

In recent years there’s been a great deal of interest in the use of open source evidence in a legal setting, and we’ve worked with a range of organisations, including human rights NGOS, academic institutes, bodies like the ICC and others to examine how it can be used.

There’s really a wide range of really important work being done by all those organisations, and great progress has been made over the last few years on understanding how open source evidence can be used in a legal setting without much fanfare.

So when I look at the online “debate” around chemical weapon use in Syria, where there’s been a lot of work done by the justice and accountability community, it becomes quite apparent how totally detached from the work of those seeking accountability it is.

If you spend a lot of time debating these things online you might imagine that’s the entire debate, when in reality it’s barely a circus sideshow in terms of the real work being done towards justice and accountability.

Effectively a lot of it is performative outrage which confuses clicks with real world impact. Getting invited to a UN side meeting to deny war crimes on behalf of Russia might make you feel important, but in terms of serious accountability work it’s not even a blip.

There’s some really great work being done on accountability on a range of issues, including chemical weapon use in Syria, and you should never confuse the online debate with real world efforts to bring war criminals to account and find justice for their victims.

But along with that there’s a lot of empty garbage that’s more about stroking egos than accountability, that confuses social media onanism with activism and page views with impact.

The justice and accountability community has meanwhile focused on putting together cases in various courts, like this one in France in relation to chemical attacks in 2013, and continue its efforts to do it elsewhere.
reuters.com/article/syria-…

Probably the best work I've seen on the scale of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the logic behind it, is by @GPPi gppi.net/2019/02/17/the…

They've got a great online portal where you can find lots of information about chemical attacks in Syria, details you'll rarely find anywhere else chemicalweapons.gppi.net

Their data portal contains details of 349 chemical attacks in Syria. Most of nosiest denialists could barely name 5, let alone 349, because ultimately they have an incredibly shallow understanding of the topic.
chemicalweapons.gppi.net/data-portal/