At GRIL, we are building new ways to demand legal accountability. Our multidisciplinary teams of law and technology students work side-by-side to translate complex data into powerful advocacy tools for our clients.
In this first-of-its-kind clinic, we build legal cases with insights from digital technologies. Right now, our students are building evidentiary support for critical issues around the world. Students are aiding the prosecution of crimes against humanity in Ukraine, developing data-driven methods to identify war crimes in Syria, documenting the realities of gender apartheid in Afghanistan, and investigating the climate change impacts of extreme heat in California county jails.
Sample projects include:
Climate Justice in California Jails
Climate change generates extreme temperatures in carceral facilities. For GRIL’s client organization, we are collecting and analyzing evidence on the impact of high temperatures on incarcerated people in California jails to determine the nature and extent that high temperature impacts are violating human rights of detained and incarcerated people.
Gender Apartheid
What does consolidation of Taliban rule mean for women? De facto authorities are publicly flogging women accused of violations of a strict morality code that regulates women’s dress, intimate relations, and movement in public. On behalf of our client organization, we are documenting these trends through open-source information, analyzing the international human rights violations of these patterns, and preparing data visualizations of these harms for submission to United Nations human rights mechanisms as well for a wider audience.
War Crimes in Syria
During the Syrian conflict multiple States conducted military campaigns, including the US-led Coalition, Russia and Türkiye. Thousands of airstrikes caused civilian harm, destroyed residences, hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. Civilian objects are protected under the laws of war, and parties that intentionally target them are committing war crimes. We integrated laws of war research and data science methods to analyze thousands of airstrikes, develop a methodology for our client, Airwars, to identify patterns of intentional targeting that advances documentation and investigation for legal and accountability purposes.
Reports
Public flogging in Afghanistan
To support the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), GRIL helped produce a landmark report documenting the Taliban’s use of public flogging from February 2022 through April 2026. Drawing on an unprecedented dataset across every province of Afghanistan and dozens of survivor testimonies, it establishes that the practice constitutes torture under international law, maps the chain of command behind it, and centers the voices of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and their families.
Read Whips of Power, Spectacle of Control
Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) Case Appeal Outcomes and Processing Timelines (1920–March 2026): Exploratory Data Analysis
At the request of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, GRIL cleaned and analyzed a century of raw data to open up the Board of Immigration Appeals to public understanding. Early findings: 71.53% of resolved appeals end in denials, only 2.06% in grants; the median appeal takes 461 days, and 10% stretch beyond 3.5 years.
Designing Justice.
Data Science for Human Rights Advocacy: A Blueprint for the Global Rights Innovation Lab Clinic. July 2025
This report is the culmination of a dedicated planning semester grounded in design thinking and informed by stakeholder and student interviews. It offers an in-depth look at GRIL’s model, capturing our vision, research process, and the insights we gained along the way. It also explores how GRIL is developing innovative services at the intersection of law, data science, and digital storytelling, and highlights the impact we aim to make in the human rights field.
Briefings for Practitioners
Tech Note – The California Law Enforcement Accountability Network (CLEAN): Teaching a small classifier to spend expensive attention wisely
Sorting through massive PDF archives presents a major hurdle: finding one specific document type without spending a huge amount of dollars or thousands of manual hours. To solve this problem, GRIL built a small, custom classifier using a layered AI-and-human review process.
This technical note provides a practical blueprint for sorting huge PDF datasets cheaply and accurately based on GRIL’s experience in identifying “notices of complaints” for the California Police Records Access Project. Although developed for police disciplinary files, the approach can be adapted to other massive, difficult-to-search datasets where rare but important documents are buried among millions of pages.
For technical details, read our briefing here.
Explainer – What is the California public database on police misconduct?
Decades of secrecy once shielded California law enforcement from public scrutiny. The Police Records Access Project (PRAP) is changing that. Aggregating roughly 1.5 million pages of records from nearly 500 law enforcement agencies, PRAP delivers unprecedented police transparency. The database provides direct, searchable access to critical records regarding:
- Police shootings,
- Incidents of use of force that resulted in death or serious injury,
- Sustained findings of sexual assault, and
- Sustained findings of dishonesty in the reporting, investigation, or prosecution of a crime or misconduct.
- Sustained findings by agencies that an officer committed specific types of misconduct, including sexual assault, excessive force, dishonesty, prejudicial action, unlawful arrest, and unlawful search.
Learn more in our briefing for practitioners, “Promoting Transparency and Police Accountability — California Policy Records Access Project.”