CCBH@KCL / /
SOLON, Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Bad Behaviour and Crime;
CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY BRITISH HISTORY at King’s College London;
INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED LEGAL STUDIES, INSTITUTE OF COMMONWEALTH STUDIES,
INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICANS and the HUMAN RIGHTS CONSORTIUM
School of Advanced Study, University of London;
RAOUL WALLENBERG INSTITUTE OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIAN LAW, SWEDEN
2ND BIENNIAL WAR CRIMES CONFERENCE 2011
Justice? – Whose Justice?
Punishment, Mediation or Reconciliation?
Thursday 3 March to Saturday 5 March 2011
Venue: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
LESLEY ABDELA is the Senior Partner in UK-based consultancy Eyecatcher/Shevolution.
She works on Gender and post-conflict recovery, implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and women’s human rights. Her work has taken her to more than 40 countries including post-conflict situations: Nepal, Iraq, Afghanistan, Aceh, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Kosovo. Her commitments have included GENCAP Senior Gender Advisor to the UN Humanitarian Agencies in Nepal (Sept 2007 –Feb 2008); Civil Society Consultant to RTI Iraq Local Governance Programme based in Hillah Sept 2003-Feb 2004 and Deputy Director of Democratisation for OSCE in Kosovo shortly after the NATO bombing.(1999). Lesley has conducted hundreds of workshops for men and women working in war situations - in NGOs, international organisations, and military who work in conflict situations. Since 2001 she has regularly conducted workshops at the Swedish Armed Forces International Centre on Gender for international military, and civilians ahead of deployment on UN Peace Operations. She served five years on the Global board of the British Council which has offices in 110 countries. She is a professional journalist and broadcaster and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists Her first experience of Conflict was as a journalist in Bosnia, writing a 7 page feature in Cosmpolitan Magazine on women in the Bosnia war. Her boots-on-the-ground experiences in Kosovo to Nepal via Sierra Leone (British Council), Iraq (RTI/USAID), Afghanistan, and Aceh (IOM) were recorded by Imperial War Museum for their archives by archivist Lyn Smith. Awards recognising her contribution include:
· Chosen July 2007 United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs European Alumni of the Month www.exchanges.state.gov/alumni/alumnus.htm)
· New Statesman magazine readers voted Lesley Abdela ‘34’ out of ‘50 Heroes of Our Time’. 2006
· ‘UK 1996 Woman of Europe award’ for work helping to develop women leaders in civil society and politics and public life in Central and Eastern European countries.
· Awarded PhD (Honorary) Women’s Human Rights for life-time contribution to women’s human rights. Nottingham Trent University. 1995
· Awarded MBE for work on women in politics and public life. 1990
TIM ALLEN is Professor of Development Anthropology at the LSE. He has expertise in the fields of complex emergencies, ethnic conflict, forced migration, local conceptions of health and healing, development aid and agencies, and ethics of aid. His particular interest lies in East Africa (especially Sudan, Uganda and Kenya). His publications include Trial justice : the international criminal court and the Lord’s resistance army (2006); and (with Mareike Schomerus) Southern Sudan at odds with itself: dynamics of conflict and predicaments of peace (2010); as well as a recent edited collection with Koen Vlassenroot, The Lord's Resistance Army: myth and reality (2010). Articles include ‘The international criminal court and the invention of traditional justice in northern Uganda’. Politique Africaine, 107, 2007.
SASCHA-DOMINIK BACHMANN joined the University of Portsmouth in 2008 and works for the School of Law where he teaches international legal subjects and works on research projects involving colleagues from South Africa, Israel, the USA and Australia. Dr Bachmann was educated in Germany (University of Munich), South Africa (Stellenbosch University and University of Johannesburg) and the United Kingdom (University of Portsmouth). He is a Major in the German Army Reserve and served as a peacekeeper with the German Army in the Balkans on three occasions prior while completing his LL.D with the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to a LL.M study at Stellenbosch University, Sascha was admitted as a German Rechtsanwalt (attorney) at the High Court of Munich. Sascha's research interest lies in International Law in general with a focus on International Criminal Law, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law and the notion of civil responsibility for breaches of international human rights. He has provided training and teaching on international humanitarian law and related military subjects to officers of various armed forces (including the UK military) and is part of ongoing humanitarian projects at the international and domestic level.
GARY BAINES [BA, HDE (UCT); BA Hons (UNISA); MA(Rhodes); Ph.D (UCT)] joined the Rhodes History department in 1990. He previously lived in Port Elizabeth and has published extensively on the history of that city. These publications include numerous articles and a monograph titled A History of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 1903-1953: The Detroit of the Union (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). He has also published widely on South African culture, especially film, literature, photography and music, and ventured into the fields of public history and memory studies. This has spawned a number of book chapters and journal articles. His research project on South Africa’s ‘Border War’ has yielded an edited volume co-authored with Peter Vale titled Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts (Unisa Press, 2008). This has been followed by a number of (review) articles on the narration and memorialization of the ‘Border War’. He teaches courses on representations of war, contested pasts, Cold War Studies and the apocalyptic imagination. He adds, ‘the content of these courses more or less reflects my current research interests’.
JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR was born in Lima, Peru. He studied archaeology at the University of San Marcos and received his Masters Degree from the University of London and is completing a doctorate in sciences at the University of Strasbourg. He has over 17 years of experience as a forensic anthropologist. He has consulted on the use of forensics in cases of Human Rights violations in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti, Ethiopia, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and the Philippines. He has lobbied for the creation of the Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (EPAF) and was a founding member of the team. He has been the president of the executive committee since its inception in 1997 and is currently the director. EPAF advocates for the use of forensic science in the systematic search and identification of the missing from the internal conflict (1980-2000). From 1996 until 2007, Mr. Baraybar worked for the United Nations. He served as forensic anthropologist for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1996 and as Chief Forensic Anthropologist/Archaeologist for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1996-2002. He has expert witness status in the International Criminal Tribunal and was one of a handful of scientists to present forensic evidence in the case of Srebrenica (Bosnia) which is the first case of Genocide to be prosecuted using forensic evidence since the Tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo. In 2002 he created the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) in Kosovo and served as its head until 2007. The OMPF developed a systematic strategy to search for and identify the missing that combines information collected from the relatives of the missing with forensic science. During his tenure as head of OMPF the remains of more than half of the missing were returned to their relatives and was awarded with the UN21 Awards. Jose Pablo Baraybar has lectured extensively on forensic methodology and on the importance of a humanitarian and systematic approach to the search for the missing. He coauthored the book, Identification of Traumatic Skeletal Injuries Resulting from Human Rights Violations and Modern Warfare, which was published in 2008. Most recently, Jose Pablo Baraybar has been awarded the 2011 Judith Lee Stronach Award by the Centre for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco.
W. WARREN H. BINFORD is an Assistant Professor of Law and the Director of the Clinical Law Programme at Willamette University College of Law in Oregon. She holds a B.A., summa cum laude with distinction, and an Ed.M. from Boston University as well as a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Professor Binford teaches inter alia International Children’s Rights, Civil Rights and the Law in Education, and runs the Child and Family Advocacy Clinic at Willamette. She has published a number of articles related to children and human rights including the use of landmines against children as a form of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, international protections for children in war generally, the exploitation of children by the Khmer Rouge, and the illegal trafficking of children following the 2011 Haiti earthquake. She is a frequent guest editorialist on issues affecting children and families in a variety of U.S. newspapers.
BILL BOWRING has been a Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London since September 2006. He is also a practising barrister (Field Court Chambers, Gray's Inn), serves as the International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and President of the European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (in eight European countries). He is also an Executive Committee Member of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, a Member of the Council of Liberty, and a Trustee of the Redress Trust, working for torture survivors. He founded, and is currently Chair, of the International Steering Committee of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC), which, in partnership with the Russian NGO Memorial and the Bar Human Rights Committee, and is assisting with over 150 cases against Russia, Georgia and Latvia to the European Court of Human Rights. He has represented applicants before the ECHR in cases against Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Russia, and Turkey. He regularly acts as expert for the Council of Europe on human and minority rights issues, and work as a trainer and expert for the Council, the European Union, OSCE (most recently the HCNM), Amnesty International and others. His 70 plus publications are on topics of international law, human rights, minority rights and Russian law (in which he is an expert and so regularly contributes to EU-Russia Centre publications and events). They include The Degradation Of The International Legal Order: The Rehabilitation Of Law And The Possibility Of Politics (2008); 'The Russian Federation, Protocol No. 14 (and 14 bis), and the Battle for the Soul of the ECHR', Göttingen Journal of International Law,2(2), 2010; and 'Fragmentation, Lex Specialis and the Tensions in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights', Journal of Conflict & Security Law, 14(3) 2010.
MAXIME BREBANT studied Contemporary History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2007) and European History at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge (2009). He worked on the prosecution of German war criminals in Belgium after the Second World War with a particular focus on the question of international cooperation. He is currently a PhD student in the ‘Liberal Way of War Programme’ at the University of Reading, where he works on the international cooperation between the United Kingdom, France and Belgium in the context of the prosecution of German war criminals (1945-1955).
TOBY CADMAN has been a Member of the Bar of England and Wales since 2001, and is currently with 9 Bedford Row, London. In 2002 he was recruited by the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (a court modelled on the ECtHR) where he served for almost two years as a legal advisor. He worked on a number of important cases including the unlawful deportation of the Algerian Group to Guantanamo Bay, as well as on a large number of criminal matters involving complaints as to the fairness of proceedings. In 2004 he joined the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a Consultant on the War Crimes Chamber Project and was appointed as the first Head of the Criminal Defence Office at the Bosnian State Court. In 2005-6 he was recruited by the Office of the Prosecutor and became the Head of the Legal Advisory Section for War Crimes and the Chief Legal Counsel to the State Prosecutor. Since September 2008 he has been with the EU Police Mission in Bosnia as a senior legal advisor on organised crime, war crimes and terrorism. Toby presented on these issues at the War Crimes conference in 2009; he is currently involved with the Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal and is presenting with Stephen Kay, QC and John Cammegh on this occasion. .
LORIE CHARLESWORTH is a legal historian and a Reader in Law and History in Liverpool John Moore’s Law School. Originally best-known for her work (stemming from her PhD at Manchester University under Professor Mike Rose) in the area of Poor Law (resulting in the recent publication, Welfare’s Forgotten Past, 2009) and legal local history, where she has published extensively/ However, Lorie’s current research interests have expanded to include the investigation and prosecution of German war crimes (especially the ‘minor’ trials) after World War II, and she is presently writing a book on this theme. She is also known for her work in the area of socio-legal theory and her interdisciplinary scholarship, Lorie is currently an Associate Research Fellow at IALS, and was a Visiting Research Fellow 2007-2008. She is one of the Directors of SOLON, and a member of the Organising Committee for the War Crimes conference; she is also editor-in-chief of the Liverpool Law Review and a member of the editorial board of SOLON’s e-journal Crimes and Misdemeanours: deviance and the law in historical perspective.
JOHN COMMERGH has, in recent years (2004-2009) gained extensive and unique expertise in international criminal law as lead counsel for one of Sierra Leone’s most notorious rebel leaders, Augustine Gbao, in the RUF trial at the Special Court of Sierra Leone. After one of the longest international criminal trials in history Gbao was acquitted on more counts and received lower sentences than any of his co-defendants (see below). More recently John has been instructed, along with Steven Kay QC and Toby Cadman of 9BRi to represent five members of the Islamic political party Jamaat e Islami who potentially face the Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide relating to the 1971 Liberation War.