In Ukraine, Identifying the Dead Comes at a Human Rights Cost

Five days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a year ago this week, US-based facial recognition company Clearview AI offered the Ukrainian government free access to its technology, suggesting that it could be used to reunite families, identify Russian operatives, and fight misinformation. Soon afterward, the Ukraine government revealed it was using the technology to scan the faces of dead Russian soldiers to identify their bodies and notify their families. By December 2022, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, was tweeting a picture of himself with Clearview AI's CEO Hoan Ton-That, thanking the company for its support. Accounting for the dead and letting families know the fate of their relatives is a human rights imperative written into international treaties, protocols, and laws like the Geneva Conventions and the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) Guiding Principles for Dignified Management of the Dead. It is also tied to much deeper obligations.