Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
09 Dec From False Dichotomies to a Real One: A Response to Shana Tabak by Vasuki Nesiah
[Vasuki Nesiah is an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.] From manufacturing petrol bombs in their homes in Northern Ireland to planning assassinations in Colombia, female combatants confound received scripts of gender and war. Shana Tabak’s article challenges the analytical frameworks deployed by orthodox approaches to transitional justice, lays out an alternative framework that she situates in critical ‘gender oriented’ scholarship and then draws from this framework to enter the world of female combatants. For Tabak this alternative framework highlights problems with orthodox transitional justice...
16 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: Teitel’s Conceptual Revolution–Locating Law in Shifting Political Ecologies
ecological thinking. Academics across diverse fields are also coming to recognize the critical importance of inter-disciplinary scholarship, especially when we are trying to address wicked problems like institutionalized violence and injustice (even as academic structures continue to impede inter-disciplinary collaboration). Transitional Justice (the book), in this regard, prefigured transitional justice (the field), as one formed through multilateral conversations between scholars of history, political science, literature, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, law, and of course the communities of activists, writers and artists who were building the field in practice all along. Although...31 Jul Beyond “Winners” and “Losers”: Understanding the International Court of Justice’s Judgment in the Jadhav Case
Article 36(1) of the VCCR, among other things, provides that when a national of a foreign country is arrested or detained, the detainee must be advised of the right to have the detainee’s consulate notified, and that the detainee has the right to regular consultation with consular officials during detention and any trial. The Optional Protocol to the VCCR gives the International Court of Justice compulsory jurisdiction to try disputes that arise out of the interpretation or application of the treaty. This basis of the International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction...
09 Apr Universal Jurisdiction — Opportunities and Hurdles
saying that international criminal justice should apply equally to all. Hopefully, this accusation of the limited application of universal jurisdiction, will not be used to discredit fair and essential justice proceedings brought by victims seeking closure, truth and accountability. Liberian human rights activists and Secretary General of the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia called the indictment of Alieu Kosiah a “boost to the national justice campaign.” Surely justice, wherever it is meted out, in particular when relentlessly pursued by victims’ groups, should be facilitated and indeed applauded?...20 Oct Ten Years After the Outbreak of Cholera in Haiti, Justice for the Victims Has Yet to Come
to resort to other measures including public diplomacy and social media to raise awareness and mobilize action to ensure that justice prevails. Such measures can form yet another form of accountability — public accountability. If justice for the Haitian victims is too expensive, then civil society must ensure that injustice is not too cheap. Justice will not visit the people of Haiti unless and until — the UN properly investigates its role in the introduction and outbreak of cholera in Haiti, including the reasonableness of the actions taken by the...
26 Feb Time for the US to Reset Its Policy on the ICC & Reassume Leadership in International Justice
US national. Syria and Myanmar are situations where the most direct routes to pursuing accountability—either the creation of a freestanding international or hybrid criminal tribunal or referral of the situations to the ICC are blocked by the actual or presumptive vetoes of Russia and/or China. (For more on vetoes see my book; see also Opinio Juris book symposium.) Yet, the US and the international community must not become complacent having created these Mechanisms—which have no capacity to conduct prosecutions. Being able to feed evidence into isolated cases pursued under universal jurisdiction or similar jurisdictional theories...10 Jun Outlawing Amnesty: The Return of Criminal Justice in Transitional Justice Schemes
[Lisa J. Laplante is Visiting Assistant Professor at Marquette University Law School] Until recently, immunity measures like amnesties were considered an acceptable part of promoting transitional justice in countries seeking to address past episodes of systematic violations of human rights. The politically sensitive context of countries seeking to broker peace between oppositional forces often outweighed the moral imperative of punishing those responsible for perpetrating human rights atrocities. Latin America exemplified this trend in the 1980s, while also popularizing truth commissions. The resulting truth v. justice debate eventually sidelined criminal trials...
08 Jan Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: Why Afghan Survivors Need Sustained ICC Action
[Yifat Susskind is the Executive Director of MADRE, an international human rights organization dedicated to meeting urgent needs in communities facing crisis and using the human rights framework to create durable social change] For women, girls, and LGBTQI+ persons in Afghanistan, the struggle for justice has never been more urgent. With each passing day, the Taliban is consolidating power while the international community edges toward normalizing relations with Afghanistan’s de facto rulers. This leaves the International Criminal Court (ICC) as one of the few institutions able to secure justice for...
17 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: Building upon Ruti Teitel’s Seminal Work–Towards a Transitional Justice Narrative
[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, and ethical dilemmas such as truth versus justice and reparations for victims versus structural inequality, and even suggesting possible ways...