Oxford Transitional Justice Research Seminars

Kumaravadivel Guruparan gives a talk as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. In 2015, Sri Lankan witnessed regime change that removed President Mahinda Rajapaksa from power. Mahinda Rajapaksa was the President who led the war against the LTTE to its finish in 2009, a war in which thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. The regime change in 2015 was characterised by many of its supporters as a change that would deliver transitional justice. The new regime also employed the language of transitional justice, particularly in the UN Human Rights Council, in its attempt to divert calls for international accountability and justice for crimes committed during the war. The regime was short lived and fell in 2019 returning another Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapakasa the war-time Defence Secretary as President. This talk will seek to explore the politics of identifying the regime change in 2015 as a transitional moment in Sri Lanka. As a general proposition, it will problematise using 'regime change' as an indicator for transition in deeply divided societies. It will argue that a Transitional Justice narrative that is aligned to the liberal peace tradition is bound to fail given that it fails to engage with the structural issues that inhibit democratic change. It will further argue that misplaced optimism generated by such thinly conceived transitional justice efforts may in fact hurt victims and survivors. Dr Kumaravadivel Guruparan served as an academic attached to the Department of Law, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka between 2010 and 2020 serving as Senior Lecturer at the time of resignation. He served as Head of the Department between January 2017 and November 2019. He is also a practicing attorney and has appeared as lead counsel in a number of cases relating to post-war human rights issues in Northern Sri Lanka including in cases relating to the right to memory, the rights of families of the disappeared and post-war land issues. He is a Co-founder of the Tamil Civil Society Forum and Founder Chair of the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research, based in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He holds an LL.B (Hons) from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, a BCL from Balliol College, University of Oxford and a PhD from University College London in Public International Law and Comparative Constitutional Law. He was awarded the Chevening Scholarship in 2010 and the Commonwealth Scholarship in 2013. Guruparan was at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights as a Research Visitor between October 2020 and January 2021.

Habeel Iqbal gives a talk as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Kashmir is among the oldest unresolved international conflicts on the United Nations' agenda. Over the last few decades, India has imposed a state of permanent emergency in Indian-administered Kashmir, through 'draconian' domestic laws that quell the political struggle and the rights of the people of Kashmir. Thousands have been killed in extrajudicial executions, scores have been arbitrarily detained, and many subjected to enforced disappearances. Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war to subjugate an entire population. The political rights and basic freedoms of the people of Kashmir have been systematically denied to them by using domestic laws like the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act 1990 and the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act 1978, among others. This seminar will address how mass human rights violations are committed in Indian-administered Kashmir with impunity, and reflect on how the state of exception has been the norm in Kashmir for decades now. Habeel Iqbal is a lawyer from Indian-administered Kashmir working on human rights issues. He is a legal consultant with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, an organisation working against enforced disappearances in Kashmir.

Douglas Guilfoyle gives a talk as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Following persistent rumours of criminal misconduct by some Australian Special Forces personnel in Afghanistan, an administrative inquiry was launched in 2016 by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force. That inquiry's report revealed shocking evidence of 23 incidents involving 25 Australian personnel and resulting in 39 killings of persons hors de combat or under Australian control, as well as other misconduct. The inquiry recommended these incidents be prosecuted before ordinary civilian courts under Australia's war crimes legislation, which largely mirrors provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. A new investigative mechanism, the Office of the Special Investigator, has been established to this end. However, the report also suggested that military leaders above the patrol commander level bore only moral or professional responsibility and there should be no prosecutions based on command responsibility. These developments raise questions about the scope of command responsibility under international and Australian law, and the relationship between national investigative mechanisms and the International Criminal Court. Douglas Guilfoyle is Associate Professor of International and Security Law at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales Canberra. His principal areas of research are maritime security, the international law of the sea, and international and transnational criminal law. He was previously a Professor of Law at Monash University, Reader in Law at University College London, and has acted as a consultant to various governments and international organisations. In 2019-2020 he was a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He is a regular contributor to the blog EJILTalk!

This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. In this seminar, Dr Craig Jones discusses his newly published book, The War Lawyers. Craig’s monograph examines the laws of war interpreted and applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israel military in Gaza. Drawing on interviews with military lawyers and others, he explains why some lawyers became integrated in the chain of command whereby military targets are identified and attacked, whether by manned aircraft, drones and/or ground forces, and with what results. Craig’s research shows just how important law and war lawyers have become in the conduct of contemporary warfare, and how it is understood. Jones argues that circulations of law and policy between the US and Israel have expanded the scope of what constitutes a legitimate military target, contending that the involvement of war lawyers in targeting operations not only constrains military violence, but also enables, legitimises, and sometimes even extends it. Dr Craig Jones is a Lecturer in Political Geography in the School of Geography, Sociology and Politics at Newcastle University. He completed his PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia in 2017. He researches the geographies of later modern warfare and is especially interested legal and medical materialities of war and conflict in the contemporary Middle East. His current work focuses on the slow violence of traumatic injury and regimes of rehabilitation among civilian populations in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. To learn more please visit the War Space website or follow him on Twitter @thewarspace.

This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. This panel discussion explores the role of art in transitional justice and the depiction of transitional justice through art. We are joined by panellists Leslie Thomas, Bernadette Vivuya and Nadia Siddiqui. The event was co-organised with the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. Leslie Thomas is the founder of ART WORKS Projects, an Emmy-award winning art director, architect, and mother. Current projects include directing The Prosecutors, curating a touring exhibition on ending female genital mutilation for the United Nations, and co-editing a book of photography on the impact of war on children in Syria. She is in pre-production on a narrative feature on women’s rights and in development on a film about the movement for Irish independence. Her multi-media human rights focused work has toured across five continents in major policy, academic, and cultural settings and been the recipient of grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the International Labour Organization, and many other major philanthropic institutions. Leslie is a graduate of Columbia University and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Bernadette Vivuya is a visual journalist and filmmaker based in Goma, Eastern DRC. She is an alumnus in “Social justice photography: Decomposing the colonial gaze” led by Yole! Africa. She reports on issues related to human rights, the environment and the exploitation of raw materials, bearing witness to the resilience and transcendence of the people in this conflict-affected region. She most recently directed the short documentary 'Letter to my Child from Rape', which brings to the screen the powerful words of poet-advocate Désanges Kabuo as she braves prejudice to claim a future for the child she bore as a result of sexual violence. Nadia Siddiqui is a cross-disciplinary researcher and writer interested in the links between cultural practice, social dynamics, and justice. As a co-director at Social Inquiry, she leads research exploring identities and belonging in displacement (and return), measuring social cohesion, and understanding what reconciliation and accountability mean to communities. She has previously worked with Oxfam, the Middle East Research Institute, the Afghanistan Analysts Network, the Applied Theatre Collective, and the International Center for Transitional Justice, among others. Nadia has also helped produce art/design events in New York City that have garnered national and international attention. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MSc. in Evidence-Based Social Interventions from the University of Oxford.

This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Art is a radical form of political participation in times of transition. Arising out of 11 months of fieldwork at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, which included 130 interviews with key decision makers, the book 'The Justice of Visual Art: Creative State-Building in Times of Transition' explores three important areas of transitional justice: the theoretical framing of justice and art; the visual jurisprudence of justice measures developed in transition; and, the cultural diplomacy practices of states emerging from conflict. In this seminar, we are joined by the author of the book, Dr Eliza Garnsey. Eliza Garnsey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge. She is currently in Australia as an Honorary Associate at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on art and visual culture in international relations and world politics, particularly in relation to human rights, transitional justice, and conflict.

This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Amnesties are a very common mechanism in transitions to democracy, approximately 85% of amnesties grant pardon to political crimes. However, the question of “what are political crimes in the amnesties context?” remains unanswered. The traditional approach laid by the duty to prosecute international crime and gross human rights violations used in international criminal law is not enough, there are numerous conducts which do not amount to international crimes and may still be contemplated with state clemency. Hence, there is a relevant explanatory gap regarding the definition of political crimes in amnesties, which may carry the space for a dangerous amount of state arbitrariness. This seminar will start by designing the characteristics of amnesties that impact political crimes concept, as well as the rationales and interests involved in amnesties. By scrutinizing the decision-making process of amnesties, the presentation aims to identify factors that might reflect the definition of political crimes. This talk provides insights into the elements that currently constitute political crimes in the amnesties context, and the challenges they pose to the fields of transitional justice and criminal justice. Renata Barbosa holds a PhD from the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), she is currently an Academic Visitor at the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford and a member of OTJR. She is also a tutor and project manager at Maastricht University.

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 genocide against the Yazidi religious community of northern Iraq, and underscored that the logic, nature, and commission of genocide has been highly gendered. Since the collapse of ISIS's "caliphate", the pursuit of criminal accountability has accelerated, though it remains hindered by a range of factors, including a struggling Iraqi justice system, and an unwillingness of many states to take back their nationals, many held in SDF detention centres and camps in northern Syria, for trial. Alongside this, there is also increased discussion of the desirability of a broader range of transitional justice measures. Sareta Ashraph hopes to address these issues. She has been working on documenting and analysing ISIS crimes in Syria and Iraq with the UN Commission of Inquiry, the Syria IIIM, and most recently UNITAD. Sareta Ashraph is a barrister specialized in international criminal and humanitarian law. Until August 2019, she was based in Iraq as the Senior Analyst on the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh. In 2017, Sareta was part of the start-up team of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (Syria IIIM). From May 2012 to November 2016, she served as the Chief Legal Analyst on the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria where she was the primary drafter of the June 2016 report "They Came to Destroy", which determined that ISIS was committing genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes, against the Yazidis. In 2011 to 2012, she was the Analyst on the Commission of Inquiry on Libya. In 2010 and 2011, Sareta was the Legal Adviser to the ICC’s Defence Office. From 2004 to 2009, Sareta was Defence Co-Counsel before the SCSL. Sareta is an associate member of Garden Court Chambers (London), and is called to the Bar of England and Wales, as well as the Bar of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

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, attitudes and societal features can nurture peace. On the one hand, policy makers need instruments to track progress on peace, whereas on the other hand, many peace scholars and practitioners suggest that peace is perhaps too complex to measure. I experienced this tension first-hand whilst leading a cross country participatory assessment of resilience in three post conflict contexts – Guatemala, Liberia and Timor-Leste – and subsequently when implementing population perception surveys on peace and justice in Eastern Congo. Last year, I conducted a systematic review of peace measurements, through which I identified 19 direct and proxy measures of peace that are used across policy and practice. In this talk, I will present the findings of the systematic review and situate them in the context of my experience with participatory approaches to defining and assessing peace in conflict affected contexts. Anupah Makoond is currently reading for an MBA at the Saïd Business School, following an MSc. in Evidence Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. Immediately prior to coming to Oxford, she led the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Peace and Human Rights programmes in the DRC and the Great Lakes. Between 2014 and 2016 Anupah was the Programme Officer for Interpeace’s Frameworks for Assessing Resilience Programme.

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 gross human rights abuses. The jurisdiction is meant to “keep victims at the centre,” advance the construction of peace, and favour restorative over retributive justice. It is tasked with the investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the 50-year conflict, the identification of those responsible, and the provision of either reduced jail sentences or alternative restorative justice sentences for those sincerely committed to telling the truth and providing reparations. Is it possible to have victim-centred transitional justice, in spite of the sacrifice of justice it entails? Can a criminal trial open the way for the reincorporation of war criminals into society without a jail sentence? What kind of peace is possible in Colombia after the Peace Agreement, and what is the court’s role in contributing to peace? During the talk, we will address these issues through the lens of the jurisdictions’ first macro-case, case 01 against the FARC for kidnapping. Julieta Lemaitre is a judge at the Justice Chambers of the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace, created in 2018 to implement the transitional justice component of the 2016 Peace Agreements with the FARC guerrilla. She is currently the investigating judge for the peace jurisdiction’s first macro-case: charges against the policy and practice of kidnapping brought against the former guerrilla leaders.

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 Criminal Court in The Hague and in Uganda, this paper argues that a gender backlash has been fomenting in international criminal justice with some practitioners expressing their discomfort with the ‘ubiquitous gender discourse’. They point out that the Court’s ‘gender agenda’ is in no small part driven from ‘outside’ and lament that it neglects sexual crimes against men. The paper shows how gender is recuperated by playing into legal sensibilities that see procedure (impartiality) rather than substantive change as the essence of (criminal) law. While patriarchy is often mystified as a ‘historical legacy’ in legal institutions, this paper explores the ongoing discursive and institutional reproduction of patriarchal assumptions by making them more palatable to contemporary sensibilities.

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 the fields of public international law, international criminal law, human rights and foreign affairs, and has published more than 100 books and articles in leading journals, academic presses, and media outlets.

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.

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 present and the past are now regarded as valid responses to past human rights violations.

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.

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.

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 question and answer format of witness examination, protection orders and the consequences of witnesses having given testimony in multiple trials. The paper assesses whether the consequences of these non-cultural impediments have been misrepresented as being due to 'culture' and how this relates to the essentialising and demeaning of 'culture' in domestic legal contexts.

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 Extraordinary African Chambers, in Senegal.

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.

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 tended to focus on youth movements, the question of how non-organised, (self-)marginalised youths relate to peacebuilding is largely unaddressed. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork with outcast adolescents in the conflict-affected town of San Carlos and marginal neighbourhoods in the close-by city Medellín, this paper addresses this gap.