Human Rights and abuses –  SPACE Documentation 

PRINS Engineering was the first independent organisation to use Earth Observation for monitoring of human abuses by the study of burnt villages in Darfur which was carried out for the Danish branch of Amnesty International in May-June 2004. The study was used as main story in Amnesty Internationals global newsletter and was followed up and used in many contexts – The mapping was based upon a cost-effective novel method which PRINS eventually documented in International Journal of Remote sensing and the research was raised by Nature. In 2005 Amnesty commissioned a report for the potential use of Earth Observation as such for monitoring of humanitarian abuses this report has have been prospective and is still valid.  

Recently, November 2021 the Swedish Prosecution Authority has open a case for war crimes in Sudan 1999 to 2003.  My initial work on land use changes in the area was an essential part of background information that triggered the formal Police investigation. The satellite analysis was later documented and scientifically published in International Journal of Remote Sensing. This an excellent example of how to unfold the potential in Landsat type of data for showing the the scale of human rights abuses - which appears to be needed for motivating large international organizations to go into action.

Unfolding the Landsat data potential require most often knowledge on both human and natural ecology - that you not even can expect from large remote sensing companies have - read this dispute. Moreover, since the initial use of EO for monitoring of human abuses in 2004 a number of organizations have taken on the responsibility to carry out analysis of human abuses based upon self explaining Very High Resolution images (VHR). However, this constrained by VHR data are costly, small archives and hard to process on large scale - on top of that - there are several issues concerning human activity that require SWIR bands to be traced effectively.

we can ADD the large scale overview.

When indications of on human right abuses are turning up they are often imprecise – however, we will be able to quickly deliver an overview of a situation at a very low cost. We are also using VHR – but usually for verification of our models in a very cost effective way.

Our experience with EO is unquestionable in this tematic area - we have worked more than 30 years with analysis in developing countries and know the drivers from extensive field and human ecology experiences and thus are a step ahead in the interpretation and analysis of the images.