Tag Archive: Sudan

African satellites track human rights crimes

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This past week, George Clooney announced an expansion to the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), an initiative he co-founded three years ago with the Enough Project’s John Prendergast. The satellite project uses satellite imagery to monitor and warn against human rights abuses in war-torn Africa.

As conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and the surrounding region become more linked with regional criminal networks, SSP will widen its focus to undertake forensic investigations that attempt to reveal how those who are committing mass atrocities are funding their activities and where they are hiding their stolen assets.

Clooney said: “We want to follow the money and find out how these atrocities are funded, who enables them, and what the smart tools are to counter these activities more effectively. Genocide and other human rights crimes are never just spontaneous events. They require planning, they require financing, and they require international indifference to succeed.  Where is the money coming from and where is it being hidden? To the extent we can, we want to make it more difficult for those willing to kill en masse to secure their political and economic objectives, and we want to move the needle away from indifference and inaction.”

The other co-founder of the SSP, John Prendergast, said: “We’ll focus on imposing a cost on those that contribute to or facilitate the perpetration of these human rights crimes.”

[The Christian Science Monitor]