Episodes
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Over the last five years, a variety of entities - governmental, non-governmental and those created by bodies within the United Nations - have determined that ISIS has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in areas it controlled in Iraq and Syria. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have independently determined that ISIS has committed...
Published 11/11/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Peace has been a notoriously difficult concept to measure because of the diverse ways in which it can be defined. Other than a general distinction between negative peace as the absence of violence, and positive peace as the absence of structural violence, i.e. norms, institutions, attitudes and societal features than can incite violence, there is little consensus on which norms, institutions,...
Published 11/11/19
This talk was the keynote seminar given as part of the Oxford Translational Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series Hope is generally elusive after a peace agreement that ends a civil war; Colombia is no exception. After Congress ratified a modified version of the peace agreement that lost the 2016 referendum, the FARC guerrillas demobilized and submitted to a newly created transitional justice court, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace; so did the Colombian military who had been tried for...
Published 11/11/19
Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) has become 'hyper-visible' in international criminal justice, yet scholars disagree whether this is a good thing for feminism or not. In focusing on the normative question of whether international criminal law can be a force for good, the empirical question, namely what exactly happens when critical concepts such as gender are incorporated into international criminal justice institutions has been neglected. Drawing on 63 interviews at the International...
Published 10/07/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Leila Nadya Sadat is the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law and Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute. She serves as Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the ICC Prosecutor, and in 2008 launched the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a ground-breaking project to write the world's first global treaty on crimes against humanity. She is a prolific scholar in...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Oxford Transitional Justice Research and the Bonavero Institute are co-hosting a discussion with William A. Schabas, Professor of International Law at Middlesex University, on his latest book, The Trial of the Kaiser, an account of the attempted prosecution of Kaiser Wilhelm II after the First World War.
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Why are certain responses to past human rights violations considered instances of transitional justice while others are disregarded? This talk interrogates the history of the discourse and practice of the field to answer that question. Zunino argues that a number of characteristics inherited as transitional justice emerged as a discourse in the 1980s and 1990s have shaped which practices of the...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. To Un-Become is a multimedia art project which explores the concept of un-becoming through revisiting Operation Storm in Yugoslavia and its consequences over two decades later. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. This panel discussion explores the issue of accountability in Sri Lanka using three lenses. Each lens will be applied to a specific human rights challenge that is associated with impunity in the country: violence against religious minorities, torture, and enforced disappearance. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales;...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Scholars reflecting on the participation of African witnesses in international trials have argued that 'culture' is an impediment. While some judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) supported this position, the majority of judges and lawyers placed emphasis on other impediments to witness testimony unrelated to Rwandan culture, including simultaneous interpretation, the...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Thierry Cruvellier, journalist and author, is the editor of JusticeInfo.net and an Op-ed contributor to The New York Times. For more than twenty years, he has been covering war crimes trials before international tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Cambodia, as well as national justice efforts in Colombia and the Balkans. More recently he has covered the trial of Hissène Habré before the...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. In 'When Political Transitions Work', Fanie du Toit, who has been a participant and close observer in post-conflict developments throughout Africa for decades, offers a new theory for why South Africa's reconciliation worked and why its lessons remain relevant for other nations emerging from civil conflicts. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales;...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. In the aftermath of the ‘no’ victory in the Colombian peace plebiscite, great emphasis has been placed on youth movements’ push for peace. However, statistics on violent groups in Latin America show that these groups are largely made of young people. The position of young people at the crux between peacebuilding and perpetuation of violence needs to be contextually unpacked. While studies have...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Prof Lattanzi’s presentation will first deal with the question of immunities of high-ranking state officials as posed by the Commission created in 1919 by the Paris Peace Conference. In a next step, it will illustrate the facts of the Al-Bashir case with a particular emphasis on the questions posed by Jordan before the ICC appeals bench. The last and most sensitive part of the presentation will...
Published 06/25/19
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Myanmar's mass-atrocities against the Rohingya minority, qualified by UN sources as a genocide, is one of the most pressing accountability challenges of our time. This has resulted in a mass-exodus of up to 1 million refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh with harrowing stories of violence. Given the failure of the UN Security Council to make a Chapter VII referral to the ICC, what options are...
Published 06/25/19
Dr Nicola Palmer analyzes the role that international criminal law in the extradition, deportation or domestic prosecution of Rwandan nationals. This paper draws on an independently generated dataset of 120 cases concerning 100 Rwandan nationals decided in 20 countries around the world. This dataset enables an analysis of the role that international criminal law is playing in their extradition, deportation or domestic prosecution. It argues that the differences in legal reasoning across these...
Published 06/25/19
Amnesties are widely used during and after armed conflicts. Despite their controversial nature, international policymakers such as the UN continue to recognise some forms of amnesty in these settings are necessary to facilitate conflict resolution. However, the specific forms and functions of amnesties during conflict and peace, and how they are tied to the negotiation and implementation of the broader peace process have rarely been subject to systematic academic analysis. In this...
Published 01/15/19