The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the culmination of a 50-year movement to create the first permanent court established to prosecute perpetrators (no matter how powerful) of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.  But in its first cases the ICC urgently needs cooperation from the international community to fulfill its justice mandate as it confronts an entrenched culture of impunity.  Currently 108 countries are members of this treaty-based court, but powerful nations China, Russia and the U.S. have not ratified the treaty, known as the Rome Statute.  Ultimately all of us are the international community, and our project’s goal is to greatly expand a global citizens constituency to demand that our leaders support an effective international justice system, spearheaded by the ICC, with actions to support the Court’s arrest warrants, and pursue universal ratification of the Rome Statute.  

IJCentral, in tandem with documentary film “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court”, will be at the core of a social network for global justice constituents, implementing a multi-platform citizen engagement strategy using geolocated mobile phone SMS text messages to generate a worldwide conversation about the rule of law and visualize the social network on the IJC Map. A joint survey conducted in Uganda (one of the ICC situation countries) by the Human Rights Center, the Payson Center for International Development, and the International Center for Transitional Justice shows that when people know more about the ICC, support for the ICC increases.

IJCentral has launched in beta stage, with Twitter adapted to the IJC Map as an initial entry platform to the global justice conversation.  We plan to expand the conversation by adding low entry barrier access such as an SMS short code and in-country mobile numbers using FrontlineSMS software with our local NGO partners around the world.  For example: after a screening of “The Reckoning” a high school class in Boston, using FrontlineSMS, could have a real time SMS Q&A with Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp leader Dennis Lemoyi in northern Uganda, one of the characters who appears in the film.  At this stage the site also includes resources such as the IJC Blog, aggregated IJC News, and the IJC Video gallery with ICC footage updated weekly, and links to all of our NGO partners and their Action alerts.  

A 3-year citizen engagement campaign will drive new constituents to IJCentral through screenings conducted around the world with our NGO partners and national/international television broadcasts of “The Reckoning”, and online delivery of the film and related media modules for activists and educators.  Our measures of success will be the creation of a broad global database of international justice constituents that can be reached for calls to action in support of the ICC’s justice mandate, and a vibrant international justice social network with low entry barrier SMS text messaging at its core, allowing for a truly inclusive global community that supports the rule of law in conflict resolution, and strengthens the mandate of the ICC for a world with justice, peace and security.    In addition: We (Skylight Pictures & Skylight Social Media) drove a 3-year worldwide campaign (2005-2008) to raise awareness of the perils of exchanging civil liberties for security in a "war on terror", spearheaded by the film "State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism", based on the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) examination of Peru's 20-year "war on terror" with Shining Path.  The film was translated into 48 languages, broadcast on television in 157 countries, available to stream on the web (with sidebar media modules), and still used by human rights and justice activists around the world.  The related project most similar to IJCentral is EDMQuechua (Estado de Miedo Quechua, the Spanish name for State of Fear) where public screenings of the Quechua version of State of Fear (70% of the 70,000 victims of the conflict were Quechua speakers) in town plazas throughout the Peruvian Andes, bringing the work of Peru's TRC to thousands of people.  This was accompanied by a site we created using available free platforms like Google Maps, YouTube, and Flickr where comments taped on Flip Video cameras are uploaded, as well as photos & text commentary, resulting in a space for the Quechua people of Peru to have their voices heard and explore and memorialze their collective past.  At every screening the audiences have been told that the film is theirs, that they are free to copy it and have public screenings and broadcast it on local community television stations as they see fit.  A local NGO that we partnered with, COMISEDH, offered to burn copies of the DVD free of charge for anyone that brought a blank DVD to their office, and so far over 500 DVDs have been made.  This is a remarkable number, because for the impoverished population of the region, purchasing a blank DVD represents a significant financial commitment.

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