Transitional Justice Institute: Public Lectures and Events

This panel event was co-hosted by the TJI, Christian Aid Ireland and ABColombia.

This event explored the upcoming report of the Truth Commission in Colombia, with a focus on two innovative measures within the Colombian transitional justice approach: the role of business in conflict and peacebuilding, and the exclusion of crimes of sexual and gender based violence from amnesties in the Colombian conflict. The panel examined the intersectionality between gender and ethnic discrimination and conflict sexual violence in Colombia.

SPEAKERS

Eamon Gilmore is the European Union Special Representative for Human Rights (since March 2019) and has also served as EU Special Envoy for the Colombian Peace Process since October 2015. He was Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade from 2011 until July 2014.

Pablo de Greiff is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at NYU. He was the UN’s first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. He is former Research Director for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College.

Laura Bernal-Bermúdez is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She is also affiliated to the Latin American Centre of the University of Oxford as a research consultant.

Their new book, with Gabriel Pereira, is Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability from Below: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tracks and analyses transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world.

María Adelaida Palacio Puerta is a lawyer specializing in education for citizenship and a lecturer in human rights with a background in teaching, consulting, working as a public official and work in women’s organisations. She served as Undersecretary of Government of Bogotá; coordinator of the legal area of Corporación Humanas; consultant for the National Women's Network, IOM and USAID. Currently, currently she works as Manager of the Sisma Mujer Corporation, a partner of Christian Aid Ireland.

Specially written histories have become an important tool in Irish state responses to ‘historical’ injustice, particularly those affecting women, their sexual, reproductive and family lives. Whatever form an inquiry takes, a ‘definitive’ history will be at its centre. Sometimes it will be authored by academic historians, though generally in collaboration with state-appointed legal advisors. Usually, it will be informed by the findings of some wider investigation, which purports to hear survivor evidence. The MBHCI Report contains the latest such history. It adapts and extends tactics also visible in predecessor reports, which dealt with abuses in industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, and obstetric violence in maternity hospitals.

This paper addresses how legal histories appear in these state responses to abuse, and especially in the MBHCI Report itself. It outlines three features: (i) a simplistic account of the relationship between state and religious law (ii) uncritical reliance on past Irish law (and on limited readings of past law) as the standard against which past abuses are evaluated and (iii) strategic use of current Irish law both to control evidence-gathering processes, and police later attempts to challenge the ‘official’ history produced in the Report. The paper will focus in detail on (ii) and invite discussion of alternative models of state engagement with difficult legal inheritances.

Máiréad Enright is Reader in Feminist Legal Studies and Leverhulme Research Fellow at Birmingham Law School.

The TJI was delighted to welcome Professor Karen Engle to discuss her important new book: 'The Grip of Sexual Violence: Feminists Interventions in International Law' published by Stanford University Press (2020). The monograph traces three decades of feminist engagement with international law and institutions with a focus on how and why both feminist activism and international law became “gripped” by the issue of sexual violence in conflict. It traces the impact that women’s human rights advocates have had on international law and vice versa, concentrating on their treatment of sexual violence in conflict. It considers a variety of international institutional and legal sites and debates in which sexual violence in conflict has played a central role: those involving military intervention, international criminal law, and human peace and security.

The seminar focuses in particular on these dynamics at the UN Security Council.

Learn more about the Transitional Justice Institute's taught postgraduate programmes in transitional justice, human rights, gender and conflict. Hear from current and former students. Apply here: https://www.ulster.ac.uk/transitional-justice-institute/study/llm-master-of-laws.

In this talk, Onur Bakiner provided an overview of the philosophical underpinnings, conceptual frames, and methodological choices informing the scholarship on truth commission impact to examine whether, how, how much, and why truth commissions influence policy, court decisions, and social norms. The findings of empirical scholarship range from partial confirmation of these bold and at times vague expectations to damning accounts of commissions’ failure to deliver.

What is more, scholars have set implicit and explicit standards for what coming to terms with the past truth a truth commission should mean: building liberal democratic institutions, transforming socioeconomic, gendered and racialized hierarchies, and reflecting local values, norms and power dynamics. Especially those studies that demand attentiveness to social justice and local justice have reported disappointment with truth commissions’ achievements.

Comments were provided by:

• Cath Collins, Professor of Transitional Justice at Ulster University and Director of the Observatorio de Justicia Transicional, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile

• Brandon Hamber, Professor at International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) and John Hume and Thomas P. O'Neill Chair in Peace, Ulster University.

Speaker profile

Onur Bakiner is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle University, USA. His research and teaching interests include transitional justice, human rights, and judicial politics. His book Truth Commissions: Memory, Power, and Legitimacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) investigates the role truth commissions play in contemporary societies, and was awarded the Best Book Award by the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association in 2017.

This is the recording of the launch of Dr Catherine O’Rourke’s new monograph, Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law(Cambridge University Press, 2020).

This event included comments from Catherine O'Rourke and Christine Bell, and featured a roundtable discussion chaired by Debora Kayembe with the following high-level experts from the fields of women's rights, conflict and international law:

• Madeleine Rees, Secretary-General of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

• Bandana Rana, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

• Adrian Johnson, UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office

• Vanessa Murphy, International Committee of the Red Cross

• Emily Kenney, UN Women

Hosted by the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University and the Political Settlements Research Programme at Edinburgh Law School.

Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law examines the protection of women’s rights in armed conflict under international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the United Nations Security Council. Through a series of case studies (DRC, Colombia, Nepal) and emblematic violations, the research identifies and proposes several opportunities to strengthen the legal status of specific protections to women’s rights; to improve how key institutions comply with and implement their own guarantees of women’s rights; to improve coordination amongst key institutions; and to maximise the strengths of different monitoring and enforcement procedures in order to enhance the overall protection of women’s rights in conflict under international law. A policy brief drawn from the book is also available.

In this seminar, Dr. Philipp Schulz talks about his recently launched book 'Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives from Northern Uganda' (University of California Press), based on his doctoral research conducted at the Transitional Justice Institute in Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Although wartime sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than is commonly assumed, its dynamics are remarkably underexplored, and male survivors’ experiences remain particularly overlooked. This reality is poignant in northern Uganda, where sexual violence against men during the early stages of the conflict was geographically widespread, yet now accounts of those incidents are not just silenced and neglected locally but also widely absent from analyses of the war. Based on rare empirical data, this book seeks to remedy this marginalization and to illuminate the seldom-heard voices of male sexual violence survivors in northern Uganda, bringing to light their experiences of gendered harms, agency, and justice.

'The Ugandan men who have survived male-perpetrated wartime rape have a lot to teach us - about constructing non-oppressive masculinities, creating mutual support, and building gender-aware sustainable peace. In his ethnographically nuanced study, Philipp Schulz also charts a more grounded approach to international justice.' - Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy

The book is available Open Access: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/97805203...​

The Irish Peace and Conflict Network, which includes the TJI, hosted this Panel discussion which explored what success and impact in relation to peace and conflict would look like for Ireland during Ireland's term on the Security Council. It explored the priorities for Security Council action in conflict-affected contexts, and what we can learn from past experiences of member states on the Council.

Sonja Hyland, Political Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade makes opening remarks, alongside:

Prof Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, University of Minnesota, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism;

Radhya Al-Mutawakel, Mwatana Organisation for Human Rights;

Louise Winstanley, ABColombia; and

Gustavo de Carvalho, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Africa.

Prof Siobhan Wills, Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University; Co-producer and co-director of Right Now I Want to Scream and It Stays With You, https://itstayswithyou.com;

Prof Monica McWilliams, Transitional Justice Institute Professor Emeritus, chaired the discussion.

On 18 February 2020, TJI hosted a workshop Deliberating Constitutional Futures on referendums.

The workshop explored the international and comparative dimensions of referendums and included sessions on the international, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish contexts.

On 18 November we launch the report from the workshop and are pleased that the commentators Andrée Murphy and Alex Kane are joining us for this event.

• The report is available read here

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security contains more than a dozen mentions of young people; to be precise, it refers twice to “women and children” and thirteen times to “women and girls.” Since the resolution’s adoption twenty years ago, many initiatives have arisen to combat conflict-related harms to children. These include the Children and Armed Conflict Agenda launched by Security Council Resolution 1612 (2005), the Policy on Children of the International Criminal Court Prosecutor (2016), and other inter- and non-governmental efforts. This seminar will evaluate the WPS resolution, twenty years on, as a child-rights instrument. Consideration of the interim initiatives will help frame that assessment, as will evolving understandings of children’s sexual and gender identities, of children’s agency and children’s autonomy – all factors that may counsel against too-quick conjoinments of “children,” or “girls,” with “women.”

Diane Marie Amann is Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law. She is also Special Adviser to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict.

This event is part of the WPS@20 seminar hosted by the Ulster University Transitional Justice Institute to mark the upcoming 20th anniversary of the adoption of Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security by the United Nations Security Council.