International Humanitarian Law

[Federica D’Alessandra is the Executive Director, Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security, Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), Oxford Blavatnik School of Government; immediate past Co-Chair & Advisory Board, IBA War Crimes Committee; Council, IBA Section on Public and Professional Interest & Human Rights Institute. Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp is a Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice, Oxford...

[Federica D’Alessandra is the Executive Director, Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security, Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), Oxford Blavatnik School of Government; immediate past Co-Chair & Advisory Board, IBA War Crimes Committee; Council, IBA Section on Public and Professional Interest & Human Rights Institute. Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp is a Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice, Oxford...

[Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School; and a Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics and the author of Transitional Justice (OUP, 2000).] I am extraordinarily honored by these contributions, which reflect a daunting range & depth of scholarly reflection.  The perspectives are as diverse geographically as in disciplinary approach.  I have been challenged to...

[Cheng-Yi Huang is a Research Professor, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. From 2016 to 2018, Mr. Huang served as the chairperson of Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, the first NGO advocating for transitional justice in Taiwan. He was one of the appointed experts providing legal opinion on transitional justice for the Constitutional Court in the case which lead to Interpretation No. 793 of 2020 August.] When...

[Valeria Vegh Weis is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin an Associate Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History and a Professor of Criminology at Buenos Aires University.] Introduction Re-reading Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice makes for an even more moving experience than expected. The book, written nearly 20 years ago, set the basis for a ground-breaking field of study, bringing to light important legal, political,...

[Arnaud Kurze is an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.] Introduction “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have,” James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street over half a century ago, describing his childhood memories in Harlem and events that painstakingly scarred his memory, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s deaths (Baldwin...

[Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Chair of the Board of Governors of the Humanitarian Law Center, Belgrade.] The publication of Ruti Teitel’s Transitional Justice coincided with the emergence of the former Yugoslavia from a decade of war and repression that had transformed the region’s social and political landscape. The hostilities and...

[Danielle Celermajer is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.] When Transitional Justice was published twenty years ago, its principal and most explicit contribution was its incisive articulation of a sophisticated theoretical framework for a range of real-world institutional innovations that had emerged as nations around the world were seeking to grapple with their violent pasts. There was already at...

[Manal Totry-Jubran is an Assistant Professor of Law at Bar Ilan University.] Transitional Justice opened a new window of opportunity to better understand the scope of concepts such as “Political Transition,” “Justice,” “Law,” and ”Liberal Democracies,” and how these interconnect in times of political change. In it, Teitel revealed the constructive and extraordinary role that the law and legal responses play in times of political transition. Suggesting...

[Tatiana Waisberg is an international  Law  lecturer, researcher and author of books and articles focusing on International Law, Transitional Justice, Latin America Studies, Terrorism and Human Rights, and a ZviMeitar Center for Legal Advanced Studies Research Fellow (20050-8).] This symposium offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on the transitional justice phenomenology over the two decades that followed the launch of...

[Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and the Queen’s University of  Belfast School of Law and since 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.] Among the many titles and honorifics she holds Ruti Teitel should be given another – namely, that of undisputed matriarch of the transitional justice...

[Frank Haldemann is Co-Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Transitional Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] I first met Ruti in 2006, when I was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University of Law. For many of us working on transitional justice in these still early days, Ruti’s book Transitional Justice...