Rights, the international criminal tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, in an effort to assist their investigative and accountability processes. The rapid increase and spread of mobile technology, and the subsequent era of citizen-journalism that followed, has increased the number of individuals engaging with the documentation and investigation of serious human rights violations. Indeed, civil society actors seeking to interact with accountability mechanisms are no longer exclusively well-trained human rights groups approaching documentation and the collection of information about serious human rights violations with a specific mandate. The diffusion of mobile technology has flooded the media with an exponentially growing amount of footage, allowing for a quasi-live (and increasingly graphic) coverage of real events. For example, the Arab Spring allowed the ability to follow remote events as they unfolded from its early days. Other examples include groups organizing themselves to collect information in order to show (previous) state leaders’ connection to human rights violations and the increasing number of victims who come forward to share the stories of the harms they suffered. On the one hand, the pro-activism of civil society groups living in conflict zones or under authoritarian regimes has brought about an improvement in coverage and an abundance of information. On the other hand, however, it has confronted the investigative and judicial practice with a number of dilemmas. Is it possible to use information collected through citizens’ journalism for the purpose of judicial proceedings in light of the quality requirements for evidence? What is the role of such civil society actors in the investigation and documentation processes and accountability mechanisms? What weight should the information they collect carry? And what risks and challenges does their presence and interplay create? The conversation on the role and consequences of “unofficial investigations” (see the Terminology section below) is today more alive and polarized than ever. On one end of the spectrum, highly specialized and concerned professionals rightly point to the irreplaceability of technical training and that even seasoned investigators with years of investigative experience are confronted with complex difficulties in their efforts to perform their official mandates. These difficulties include the highly complex nature of the violations and crimes under investigation, the high 12