This story contains references to violence, war crimes, and descriptions of atrocity footage presented in international courts.
During the opening statement in the trial of Dragomir Milošević, a Bosnian Serb general prosecuted for the siege of Sarajevo at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, prosecutors showed footage of the aftermath of a shelling at the Markale Market in Sarajevo. According to the prosecutor, the video demonstrated the “human carnage and destruction depicted so graphically” that it captured “sheer terror and destruction visited upon the civilians of Sarajevo.” The prosecutor invited the courtroom to see how destructive and terrifying the attack was, rather than relying on verbal description alone.
Moments like this are the focus of Veerle Veerbeek’s doctoral research in the EUI Department of History. Her dissertation traces why and how photographs and videos of human suffering have been used and contested in the prosecution of atrocity crimes, from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945 through to the present day.
“These types of visuals have something intangible,” Veerle says. “Seeing mass graves, executions, or people looking for relatives after bombings feels like evidence. These visuals bring the crimes to life and truly reveal the horror. But it is unclear what it really shows: It often depicts the aftermath of atrocities, and the perpetrator is almost never on screen.”
In practice, her research means spending time with transcripts of the court proceedings and the audiovisual exhibits themselves. She is currently working on her chapter on the Yugoslavia tribunal, searching through the archive, locating the right cases and court days, finding the visual material that was presented as evidence.
She is deliberate about how she handles that material. She does not watch it every day, and she does not do it while working from home, keeping those visual experiences outside her private sphere. When she does sit down with the footage, she stays in what she describes as “investigator mode”, writing down what she sees. “If these images get too graphic or gruesome, I fast-forward through those parts and do not watch them closely,” she says. “I do not think it is relevant to my research to know exactly how detailed, shocking, and gruesome it looked. And I think the fact that I fast-forward says enough.”
The questions that drive her research are about what these images do when they enter a legal setting. How does seeing them in a courtroom, where something has to be done with them, differ from seeing them anywhere else? How are they used? What does it do to the words that dominate legal proceedings, and what does it do to the narrative? And what happens with this “evidence” when it gets out of the courtroom again?
Over time, as Veerle traces in her research, courts have progressively developed formal guidelines around admissibility and authentication. “You would think that this sanitises the image’s power, that it is just another piece of evidence,” she says. “But what I have seen so far in court records is that these images still function as powerful rhetorical tools to convey meaning and to make the atrocities tangible and present. They are used to ‘give a sense’ of what victims experienced or to provide context to these mass atrocities.” At Nuremberg, she explains, the prosecutors introduced a graphic film of the concentration camps to make clear what the concept of a concentration camp actually meant.
In her reading of the records, prosecutors often state that this type of visual material speaks for itself, as if it is so powerful that it requires no explanation or is worth more than words — even though words are actually needed to describe what can be seen on those images, or how these images can be interpreted. Prosecutors also routinely introduce visual material as being representative: What is shown in one video, they argue, occurred in many other places.
“Or prosecutors claim that what will be seen is gruesome or disturbing,” Veerle notes, “as some kind of trigger warning. I wonder if this is an effort to disentangle emotional effect from judicial relevance, or maybe to highlight that the emotional effect, and to see this suffering, is necessary for understanding these crimes and has judicial relevance.”
Veerle also looks at how defendants have responded. At Nuremberg, Hermann Göring, one of the most senior Nazi leaders on trial, dismissed a prosecution film. According to the prison psychologist G.M. Gilbert, Göring claimed that “anybody can make an atrocity film if they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor shoving them back in again.”
At the ICTY tribunal, Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian president, took a different approach entirely. During his own opening statement, he showed dozens of graphic images of corpses, severed limbs, and mangled bodies, which he claimed were victims of NATO bombings. “He did not show these images to deny his own behaviour,” Veerle says. “He showed them to say: I am on the right side. Look at all the horrible things NATO has done.”
Her research also shows that the lifecycle of visual material does not end at the courtroom door. During Milošević’s trial, the prosecution presented what became known as the Scorpion execution video, footage showing members of a Serbian paramilitary unit executing Bosniak prisoners. It is an unusual piece of video because it showed the crime in action, including how the perpetrators talked to their victims. Its admissibility and probative value were still being debated in court. But outside the courtroom, the consequences were immediate: The perpetrators visible on screen were arrested, and families of victims recognised their relatives. “Courtroom treatment of these visuals does not determine their life outside the courtroom,” she says. “And legal recognition does not eliminate public debate: Historical revisionist discussions continue, and defendants often begin their (public) denials by claiming that images do not prove anything, or consistently dismiss footage as inconclusive, fake or forged.”
The question of whether images can be trusted is getting more pressing, Veerle argues, but is not new. “Already before deepfakes, defendants and historical revisionists said ‘this is not real’ or ‘this does not prove anything’, and that is also the complexity of this material,” she says. “It is crucial for courts to develop strong protocols for this.” She points out that civil society actors such as Bellingcat and Mnemonic also play a significant role, and sometimes have more technical knowledge than the courts themselves.
There is also a broader tension in her work. “For a long time, many believed, or hoped, that greater visibility of mass atrocities ensured that they would not happen anymore, or that often,” she says. “But as we all can see, scenes from Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan illustrate that horrific violations continue to be committed and recorded. Increased visibility can reshape public opinion, but does not necessarily translate into legal or political action.”
As she sees it, more documentation does not automatically mean more accountability. “And even if these images make it to court,” she adds, “defendants can still deny it, part of the public can still deny it, or ignore it. That is the paradox that interests me: the intangibility of visual material of human suffering. It is everything and nothing at the same time.”
Veerle’s path to these questions began with the present, not the past. After studying history and Arabic language and culture at the University of Amsterdam and the research master in Middle Eastern studies at Leiden, her MA thesis focused on the Syrian Archive, a Syrian diaspora organisation in Berlin that collects and verifies documentation of human rights violations in Syria. “I saw how hard they worked for justice for their country, the place that they fled, where many of their family members were still located,” she says. “And I saw how hard they worked for the few victories.”
During that research, she saw the Archive’s work produce results she had not expected. Around the time she was writing her thesis, their open-source investigations helped lead to the conviction and fining of three Belgian companies for violating EU export-licensing rules by exporting large quantities of chemicals to Syria between 2014 and 2016, which can be used to produce sarin gas, a chemical weapon. It was not a prosecution of those directly responsible for the chemical attacks in Syria, but some form of accountability, as she describes it. The Syrian Archive is now part of Mnemonic, an umbrella organisation that includes archives preserving documentation from Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine. “This modern-day issue occurs across various contexts,” she says, “and is not necessarily new.”
Going back in time, she argues, reveals what has changed and what has not. “It shows how prosecutors and courts have struggled with it and tried to grasp this intangible type of evidence,” she says. “History helps us see that problems we face now, like verification, spectacle, and mnemonic politics, have precedents.”
At the EUI, her research is supervised by Nicolas Guilhot, professor of Intellectual History, with Sarah Nouwen, professor of Public International Law, as second reader. As a historian working on a legal topic, Veerle says that interdisciplinary supervision matters. “I have to have all the legal things right,” she explains. The precision required goes deep. “At one point, Sarah pointed out that in this international criminal law context, the spelling for the verdict is judgment, not judgement”.
Recently, Veerle went to see the film Nuremberg in a cinema. It includes footage from the concentration camp film that was shown in the courtroom at the original trials. That is the same material she has spent two years with. A dark cinema on a big screen is a different setting from her usual research.
“Quite surprisingly for me,” she says, “even though I have been working with this and looking at these images for two years now, it made a big impact on me.”
“It will remain uncomfortable to look at,” she reflects. “But this is also what interests me about this topic. Is looking at these images, while knowing something has to be done with them, different from normal looking?”
Veerle Veerbeek is a PhD researcher in the EUI Department of History. Her doctoral thesis examines the use of visual material of human suffering in the prosecution of atrocity crimes since the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945–1946). Her research is supervised by Nicolas Guilhot, with Sarah Nouwen as second reader.
Image: chrisdorney / shutterstock.com