Violations Watch

Time period Loading… Incidents reported in the 28 days up to the last update. Updated every Monday and Friday morning (UK time).

An open log of reported violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, collected from news and social media and shared as leads for investigators, journalists and researchers.

Most entries are unverified leads, not findings. Each one summarises what was reported, by whom and when, with links to the original sources. Check them before relying on them.
—incidents in this period
—countries and territories
—Critical or High priority
—confirmed by an analyst
—last updated

Where incidents were reported

CriticalHighMediumLowCircle size: number of incidents. Country-level points sit at the country's centre.

Incident log

Download data (CSV)Open as JSON
Loading the incident log…

Status labels

LeadReported in the media or on social media and screened for relevance, but not independently checked. Treat as a starting point.
ConfirmedReviewed by an analyst: the report describes a real event that falls within scope, with the details as given.
VerifiedIndependently checked by an analyst, for example by geolocating footage or corroborating with independent sources.

Priority (Critical to Low) reflects the reported severity, scale, harm to children and number of sources. It is not a judgement of legal responsibility.

How this is compiled

  • News and social media feeds are monitored daily across several conflicts. Reports in Arabic and Persian are machine-translated before screening.
  • Each report is screened for violations of international humanitarian, human rights or criminal law. Ordinary crime, politics and military operations against combatants are excluded.
  • Reports of the same event are merged into one incident with a permanent ID (VW-year-number), so later reports and corrections attach to the same entry.
  • Claims from parties to a conflict and from state media are labelled as such and never raise an incident's priority on their own.
  • Legal frameworks shown are indicative only: the provisions a reported act of that type commonly engages in that country's context. They are not legal findings.
  • IHL references cite the source in full, then the rule or article: the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 (I: wounded and sick; II: wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea; III: prisoners of war; IV: civilians), Additional Protocol I (1977, international armed conflicts), Additional Protocol II (1977, non-international armed conflicts) and the rules of the ICRC Customary IHL Study, which bind all parties including armed groups (ihl-databases.icrc.org). In non-international conflicts only Common Article 3 of the Conventions and Additional Protocol II apply as treaty law.
  • Victims' names and identifying details are not published, and nothing here is graphic.

Using and correcting the data

  • Cite incidents by their VW number. The CSV and JSON downloads carry every field shown here.
  • Where a source page has been archived, the archived copy is linked beside the original.
  • When an incident is later confirmed, verified, corrected or found to be unfounded, its entry is updated rather than removed silently.

Corrections and contact: email violationswatch@proton.me with the incident's VW number, what is wrong and a source if you have one. Corrections are made as quickly as possible and recorded below.

Corrections log: no corrections yet.