Expanding and protecting human rights from space

Abstract

The area of surveillance of human activities from above is fraught with concerns and controversy. Such surveillance is clearly being used in ways that invade human lives and often put those lives in danger. At the same time, there is an argument for more oversight, and the need to support more surveillance, in a controlled and monitored way, to expose and render access to sites of criminal activity, and particularly those of the most egregious crimes—slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, and the operation of ‘rebel’ military gangs or national militaries run by rogue states. If nature can be harried, harmed, and turned against human existence, it is also true that humans have now brought increasingly powerful diagnostic techniques to bear so that oceans, land, forests, fields, plains—all ecosystems—can be monitored for health as well as the scars of exploitation—including that of the human within the monitored ecosystem. The field of human rights now stretches far beyond humans to all life and nature—since useful and meaningful human rights can’t truly exist in a physical and natural world that is hostile to homo sapiens. Earth observation can be, and often is, a force for good.

It is a key aim of the Airspace Tribunal to protect the rights and privacy and lives of those who may be overseen from both airspace and outer space. This is exactly as it should be. If we are concerned about anyone, whether malevolent or friendly, who might be monitoring our phones and devices, viewing us from our own and other ubiquitous cameras integrated into our gadgets and mounted all about our open spaces, urban or otherwise, as well as those eyes and ears high in the atmosphere or orbiting beyond, then we must think very carefully about who sees what, what might be recorded, and who controls that recording. The current explosion of previously unimagined levels of total monitoring, such as that carried out by the Chinese government in Xinjiang Province, provides a glimpse of a dystopian future in which airspace is weaponised—as it has been against the Uyghur population now marked for erasure and genocide. The full potential of both sinister and benign surveillance is not yet understood, and it is not surprising that only a little thought and imagination is needed to push us towards more control, reduction, and management of technological oversight, as well as the need for a true and enforceable human right of freedom from ubiquitous surveillance.

My argument, however, is for more oversight, and the need to support more surveillance, across more wavelengths of light and beyond—in a controlled and monitored way—to expose and render access to sites of criminal activity, and particularly those of the most egregious crimes—slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, and the operation of ‘rebel’ military gangs or national militaries run by rogue states. There are many other crimes against humanity that might be seen from space, but I focus on these four because they are intertwined, and with each additional combination become exponentially more dangerous to both human life and to planetary well-being.

We know now that slavery is part of nearly ninety percent of all modern conflicts,¹ and that a large part of those armed conflicts can be detected and monitored from space. We also know that environmental destruction drives conflict and increases enslavement²—and that Earth observation can detect assaults on ecosystems early and often. Genocide can also include destroying the environment in which the target population lives, and that environmental destruction also creates waves of refugees, who are then vulnerable to exploitation and enslavement. Virtually all of these situations can be seen from space. Even the steady increase in severe weather events such as hurricanes, driven in part by the continued warming of the oceans, rolls together the risks of exploitation, conflict, and further environmental destruction.³

But if nature can be harried, harmed, and turned against human existence, it is also true that humans have now brought increasingly powerful diagnostic techniques to bear so that oceans, land, forests, fields, plains—all ecosystems—can be monitored for health as well as the scars of exploitation—including that of the human within the monitored ecosystem. The field of human rights now stretches far beyond humans to all life and nature—since useful and meaningful human rights can’t truly exist in a physical and natural world that is hostile to homo sapiens. Earth observation can be, and often is, a force for good.

Finding the world’s tallest flowering tree

What is believed to be the world’s tallest flowering tree is in Borneo.⁴ It was discovered using airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) conducted in 2014, then verified with Terrestrial Laser Scanning and other instruments, including, ultimately, a tape measure. My colleague, Prof. Doreen Boyd, an Earth observation specialist, took part in finding and measuring this tree, a tropical Shorea faguetiana, that may be the world’s tallest flowering plant as well. It stands just over 100 m in height. The health and condition of such a majestic tree speaks to the quality and challenges of its ecosystem. The simple discovery of such a giant increases the likelihood that its ecosystem will be more carefully considered and better protected. The fact that it can be picked out of vast areas of existing forests points to the power of satellite imaging and its potential uses for both human and environmental rights. As with trees, so with people.

My own earliest attempts to bring airspace and orbiting surveillance to slavery and ecocide were fruitless. Spying on a slave-based criminal charcoal camp in Western Brazil (the charcoal is sold to the steel industry) in the 1990s,⁵ I was struck by how the camp was carved from a protected forest, and large enough that, given the uniform carpet of trees, the camp would be obvious in most satellite imagery. When Google Earth launched in 2001, I immediately used it to search the area of Mato Grosso do Sul where I had observed the slave-based charcoal camps. Even given the glacial speeds of personal computers in 2001, I found the camps within minutes, as well as others I’d never seen from ground level.⁶

Armed with these simple images and the accounts and slave-narratives collected in Brazil, I approached anyone concerned with, or using satellite technologies, who would listen. The UN Space Agency was politely negative; satellite companies providing imagery at a cost to businesses offered their services but the expense was prohibitive, and several Earth observation scientists demurred, citing that their expertise was in weather, or land use, or topics that were classified operations of the intelligence agencies.

The breakthrough occurred in 2016 with the growth of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham and the participation of geographers, led by Prof. Doreen Boyd, with extensive Earth observation experience. A second pair of photographs opened the discussion and demonstrated the investigative and applied power of satellite imagery. In 2014 I had carried out field work to study the enslavement of children in Bangladesh in fish processing camps. These camps had been carved out of the Sundarbans UNESCO World Heritage Site where the great mangrove forest reaches the Indian Ocean. As a protected UNESCO Heritage Site there should have been no human presence except approved wardens. However, my research colleague and well-respected human rights photographer, Naser Khan, working undercover, was able to capture this remarkable image—a modern slave driver beating boys to hurry their work on fish-drying frames, all within the protected UNESCO site.

He also took this image of the fish processing and drying racks at the same site—note the raised racks in the background where the children were being beaten in the other photograph.

Having taken care to record our position within the larger UNESCO site, I searched Google Earth and found this image:

To the right of the image is the pristine mangrove forest, the largest carbon sink in all of Asia, to the left are the fish drying racks and boat landings of the child slave-based fish processing camp. I shared these images with the Earth observation specialists at the University of Nottingham and they used this information and images to look closely into the situation in the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

These specialists rapidly achieved a breakthrough in the use of satellites in exposing human rights violations. They confirmed the ongoing exploitation and fish processing in the original camp photographed by Naser Khan, and then widened their view to discover nine more active slave-based fish processing camps within the protected UNESCO site. Calling on historical images from the 1990s, they then showed the evolution of some of these camps, as well as noting how sea-level rise and ecological change forced the abandonment of some camps.⁷ The precise location of crime scenes within a UNESCO protected site led to token police action by Bangladeshi law enforcement, but also increased and ongoing international pressure from countries, such as the USA, that import these dried fish.

Once this approach was demonstrated, the Earth observation team turned to another key area of enslavement within a particularly environmentally destructive industry—brick making across South Asia. Across South Asia bricks are produced by very primitive methods, so old they match the techniques described in Egypt in the Old Testament. Soil is dug by hand, mixed with water by hand, and then shaped and formed into bricks by hand using a simple wooden box frame. The bricks are left to dry and then stacked in a mud-covered kiln to be fired. The primary fuel for firing bricks is scrap wood, scrap automobile tyres, and any other free or cheap combustible substance, including the bags or boxes used to carry pesticides and insecticides or other dangerous chemicals. Entire families are enslaved to carry out this work, mothers dig soil and make the mud that is pounded into the forms by children to make the bricks, men fire the kilns and suffer serious burns and often death when part of the kiln collapses on them. The CO₂ emissions are unfiltered and extreme, the tyres and other waste burned mean poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals are released in large amounts. The families enslaved at the kilns suffer from all of these poisons, and the dangers of working in a dangerous and unregulated kiln. The women and girls also suffer sexual assault by the kiln owner, his relatives, and his foremen. One study⁸ calculated the extent of atmospheric CO₂ from all such slave production, including large-scale illegal deforestation. The estimate is that if slavery were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of CO₂ (2.54 billion tonnes) in the world after the USA (7.28 billion tonnes) and China (7.52 billion tonnes)—the fourth highest emitter of CO₂ is Russia (1.53 billion tonnes).

Given this vast impact of slave exploitation in production that is also inherently destructive to the environment, a key unanswered question concerned how many polluting brick kilns exist in South Asia—no count or estimate had ever been attempted. Answering that question, which would allow planning and the amelioration of pollutants and CO₂, required both extensive use of satellite images and building a pattern recognition machine-learning program to enable automatic kiln identification and enumeration. About 120 ‘citizen science’ volunteers joined an online course that taught them how to identify kilns in satellite images. As the volunteers improved at identification a machine learning algorithm was “learning” from the volunteers and in time became proficient and reliable at identifying kilns. Once the machine learning was complete, the program reviewed all satellite images across all of the Brick Belt of South Asia. The machine estimate is that there are 55,387 kilns in South Asia. Given that these types of kilns will hold in slavery ten to twenty persons, they represent the location of some 1.1 million enslaved persons. Given that each kiln now has a specific and accurate GPS location, it is not surprising that law enforcement and anti-slavery groups have been requesting the coordinates for all kilns in their area. The yellow dots in the image below show the location of each of the kilns in the “brick belt” that stretches across Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Conclusion

Professor Doreen Boyd estimates that 40% of slavery may be visible from space, totalling approximately 18 million enslaved persons. The examples given above are just the opening steps that demonstrate how tools in the airspace and outer space might help locate and uproot the hidden crime of slavery and the concurrent crimes of environmental destruction. Indeed, the genocide being carried out against the Uyghurs, the forced labour in North Korean prison camps, the use of child soldiers in many parts of the world, the recent rampant destruction of the protected Amazon basin under Bolsonaro, and the extensive enslavement of fisherfolk across of our oceans, to name just a few examples, can now be observed, counted, and marked for interdiction. I leave it to the legal experts to construct a durable and protective framework of law and convention that might both support and regulate such Earth Observation tools in the service of liberation and freedom.

Notes

• 1. “Contemporary slavery in armed conflict: Introducing the CSAC dataset, 1989–2016” Journal of Peace Research, 2022-07-26, https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211065649 Angharad Smith, Monti Narayan Datta, Kevin Bales.

• 2. Bales, Kevin Blood and Earth: Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Speigel&Grau (Penguin: Random House) publication date: 19 January, 2016.

• 3. Bales, Kevin “What is the Link between Natural Disasters and Modern Slavery,” Journal of Modern Slavery, Vol. 6 Issue 3, 2021, p. 34–45, https://doi.org/10.22150/jms/ILNS6045.

• 4. Alexander Shenkin, Chris J. Chandler, Doreen S. Boyd, Toby Jackson, Mathias Disney, Noreen Majalap, Reuben Nilus, Giles Foody, Jamiluddin bin Jami, Glen Reynolds, Phil Wilkes, Mark E. J. Cutler, Geertje M. F. van der Heijden, David F. R. P. Burslem, David A. Coomes, Lisa Patrick Bentley and Yadvinder Malhi “The World’s Tallest Tree in Three Dimensions” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, June 2019, Vol. 2, Article 32.

• 5. Bales, Kevin Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, University of California Press, April 1999.

• 6. I wish I could offer GPS coordinates so that you might see such slave-based camps in Mata Grosso now, but the forests are gone, cut and burned for charcoal. Criminals are happy to use the crime of slavery to destroy both human lives and entire ecosystems—as long as profits are to be made.

• 7. “Remote sensing of fish-processing in the Sundarbans Reserve Forest, Bangladesh: an insight into the modern slavery-environment nexus in the coastal fringe” Maritime Studies, B. Jackson, D. Boyd, C. D. Ives, J. Decker Sparks, G. M. Foody, S. Marsh, K. Bales. 2020.

• 8. Bales, Kevin Blood and Earth: Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Speigel&Grau (Penguin: Random House) publication date: 19 January, 2016.