The United States first began to photograph the Earth from space between 1950-60 during the cold war. Those first surveillance satellites were strictly for ‘national security’, but within 30 years commercial firms were offering similar services for all sorts of uses. One area of potential, explored by Amnesty International in the late 1990s, was to use satellite imagery to identify human rights abuses.
It is a method of investigation that continues to hold promise in some contexts, but despite the intervening years the practice is still very much in its infancy. While satellite imagery can show the visible traces of large-scale aerial bombardment, fire, or killing with some credibility, it cannot detect violence and exploitation taking place in closed or semi-closed spaces like homes or workplaces. The ‘slavery from space’ project, developed by the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, overlooks this rather basic limitation.
‘Slavery from space’ seeks to use satellite images to identify brick kilns in South Asia and, by extension, estimate the number of ‘slaves’ living in the region. It further aims to study the impact of kiln-based slavery on climate change, stating that “the closely related nature of these two global problems suggests that they could well be addressed simultaneously rather than separately.”
