Sarah Zarmsky, PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the Human Rights Centre, is a recipient of the 2023-2024 Modern Law Review Scholarship for her PhD thesis ‘Accountability for Digital Harm Under International Criminal Law’, supervised by Professor Carla Ferstman (University of Essex) and Dr Daragh Murray (Queen Mary University of London).

Sarah was awarded the Mike Redmayne Scholarship, instituted in memory of past MLR Committee Member Professor Mike Redmayne, which is presented to the best applicant in the fields of Criminal Law and the Law of Evidence (and related fields).

Modern Law Review Scholarships are prestigious awards provided to doctoral researchers in the United Kingdom and are funded by the Modern Law Review. Sarah is the first candidate from the University of Essex to receive the scholarship!

The research visibility team talked to Sarah about her success and took the opportunity to find out more about her plans:

This is an impressive achievement. How does it feel to bring this award to the University of Essex for the first time?

Thank you! It feels great, I’m very proud of it and to be part of such an impressive group of recipients. It’s very rewarding to have your research, that you invest so much hard work in, be recognised by others, especially by a journal as reputable as the Modern Law Review.

Could you tell us a bit more about your research? What gaps or shortcomings have you identified when it comes to addressing digital harm in the context of international criminal law?

My research examines how digital harm with relevance to the perpetration of international crimes may or may not be accommodated within existing international criminal law frameworks. Where criminalization may not be appropriate or feasible, it identifies possible alternatives for obtaining justice for victims of digital harms, such as through corporate criminal liability or regulatory frameworks.

I think the main takeaway so far is that the law has not yet ‘caught up’ with new ways of inflicting harm through technology, and depending on the type of harm, international criminalisation may or may not be the answer. There are some digital harms where we can see a clear link to existing international crimes, such as online hate speech and incitement to genocide, or sharing footage of crimes as an outrage upon personal dignity. It will be harder to accommodate more ‘novel’ types of harms, such as algorithmic harms or digital mass surveillance with ICL as it stands, so I am entering the stage of my research where I explore complementary strategies for achieving justice for victims of those harms.

In a single sentence, how would you summarise the importance of your research when describing it to an undergraduate student?

New technologies are important for advancing accountability for international crimes, but they also create new ways to perpetrate existing crimes or entirely new crimes, so this research is important in laying the foundation for future discussions as to how international criminal law can best accommodate digital harms.

With the evolving nature of digital threats and the global nature of the internet, how can international cooperation and collaboration be fostered to ensure effective accountability mechanisms for digital harm? Are there any notable examples or initiatives you could share that illustrate promising efforts in this area?

This is a complex question, but to answer it briefly, I would stress that as an international community, we need to be recognizing how harmful new technologies can be if used maliciously and that these harms are grave enough to be international crimes. I think sometimes the technology aspect can be roped in with other more ‘traditional’ offences and not treated as crimes on their own, which can result in less tailored justice for victims.

There are some promising developments in domestic war crimes trials, such as in The Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, where individuals have been convicted and sentenced for war crimes for sharing degrading footage of executions on social media. I think these are positive developments because they serve the expressive function of recognizing how humiliating and degrading it can be to share footage of people in their most vulnerable states, and send a message that this is a serious crime.

This has not yet happened at an international criminal court or tribunal, but with the rise of open-source evidence initiatives at the ICC for example, I think it could definitely be a possibility going forward.

Do you anticipate your research will influence policy and if so, how?

I hope that my research can provide guidance for how ICL lawmakers and practitioners can ensure that the law keeps up with the times to fully address new ways of inflicting harm through technological means. My goal is to bring these issues to light and hopefully spark discussions within the ICL community about how we can account for digital harms moving forward.

Which direction do you see your research going in the future and why?

I’m now entering the third year of my PhD, during which I plan to apply my research thus far to one or two case examples and be able to highlight how the theory might work in practice, which I think will be really valuable. After the PhD, I would like to continue in this realm of ICL, human rights, and new technologies, perhaps delving deeper into one of the specific digital harms with a nexus to international criminal law that I have identified in the thesis.