Derechos: Human Rights Listings

The
conference will examine the spectrum of ways in which such individuals are encouraged to
engage with processes designed to deal with the past - including prosecutions, limited
guarantees of immunity and amnesties – and discuss the merits and demerits of each. It is
hoped that the experience of these different jurisdictions, and the input from local experts on
the Northern Ireland context, will assist in ongoing discussions on the implementation of the
recommendations from the Consultative Group on the Past.

The international conference will feature a roster of five international speakers representing
these diverse jurisdictions, as well as a plenary panel of speakers from Northern Ireland. The
range of expertise of these speakers is indeed comprehensive, and includes a range of
transitional justice processes such as trials, truth commissions, reparations, community-based
justice, and memorialisation. As you will from the brief descriptions below, many of the
international speakers have been involved in such processes as both practitioners and
researchers:

Phil Clark is Research Fellow in Courts and Public Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal
Studies at Oxford University, where he is co-convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice
Research Group. Phil is expert on international, national and community-based responses
to mass violence in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Cath Collins is a professor at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and an associate
fellow at the Irish School of Ecumenics in Belfast. She was previously the Associate
Fellow for the Americas for Chatham House.
Pablo Galain Palermo is a researcher in the Latin America Department of Max Planck
Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. He is from
Uruguay and has researched the transitional justice experience there extensively. He also
researches on transitions in Germany, Portugal and elsewhere in South America.
Piers Pigou is a Senior Associate for the International Center for Transitional Justice
with responsibility for Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe in particular. Piers previously
worked for a range of transitional justice projects in South Africa, East Timor, and
Zimbabwe, and he was a member of the Investigative Unit of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.
Jasmina Pjanic is the Director of the Criminal Defence Section of the Registry of the
Court of BiH, which encompasses the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She
was previously a national legal advisor in the Criminal Institutions and Prosecutorial 2
Reform Unit of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) for Bosnia and Herzegovina
(BiH), the country’s chief civilian peace implementation agency.

The deadline for registration for this conference is 15 June 2009 and due to the limited sp

Download registration form

We look forward to your participation. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate
to call the conference organiser Louise Mallinder at Queen’s University:
l.mallinder@qub.ac.uk or (+44).(0)28.9097.1348.

Yours Sincerely

Prof. Kieran McEvoy Prof Brice Dickson Dr Louise Mallinder
School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast
Conference Details
Venue: Wellington Park Hotel, 21 Malone Road, Belfast, BT9 6RU
Date: 22 June 2009
Capacity: 100 registered participants
Sponsors: Arts and Humanities Research Council 3
Roster of International Speakers
Dr Phil Clark: Phil Clark is a Research Fellow in Courts and Public Policy at the Centre for
Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and co-convenor of the Oxford Transitional
Justice Research Group. He received his DPhil in Politics from Balliol College, University of
Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His thesis explored issues of post-genocide
justice and reconciliation in Rwanda, focusing on the gacaca community courts. His research
involved extensive fieldwork in Rwanda and elsewhere in the Great Lakes, where he
interviewed 100 genocide suspects and more than 150 genocide survivors, community leaders
and Rwandan government officials. Following his doctoral work, he was the researcher and
author of a project for the Open Society Justice Initiative, exploring issues of the
complementarity of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and national and community-level
institutions in the DRC and Uganda. The project was based on five months’ fieldwork in the
DRC and Uganda in 2006 and 2007. Dr. Clark was also technical advisor and co-author of a
2007 UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights project surveying popular
perceptions of transitional justice and peacebuilding in northern Uganda. He has advised the
UK parliament, the Sudanese government, the ICC, the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda, Human Rights Watch and Crisis Group on conflict issues in Africa.

Dr Cath Collins: Cath Collins has been a professor of politics at the Universidad Diego
Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research
Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), where she
was in charge of an EU-sponsored research project on democracy, human rights and the rule
of law. During 2004 and 2005 she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at
the Institute for the Study of the Americas, a graduate school of the University of London.
Her doctoral thesis, completed at the same Institute in 2004, dealt with justice developments
in post-transitional Chile and El Salvador. She has written on the international dimensions of
the Pinochet prosecution in Chile and on human rights prosecutions and the state in Chile and
El Salvador. She is currently researching the politics of ‘human rights lawyering’ in Chile
and Argentina and the politics of memorialization in the Southern Cone, and is developing
projects looking at the judicialisation of human rights politics and at lessons which can be
learnt from Latin American transitional justice trajectories in other conflict and post-conflict
settings, particularly Northern Ireland.

Dr Pablo Galain Palermo: Pablo Galain Palermo has been a researcher in the Latin America
Department of Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg,
Germany. He is originally from Uruguay, where he studied law at the Universidad de la
República. He subsequently completed his doctorate at the Universidad de Salamanca in
Spain, which looked at the experience of amnesty in Uruguay as part of a broader study on
the purpose of punishment. He now researches in the areas of transitional justice, reparations,
disappearances, restorative justice, and international criminal law, with part icular focus on
Latin America, Germany and Portugal. In April 2009, he did fieldwork in Uruguay and
advised the prosecutor in most of the military dictatorship-era cases.

Piers Pigou: Piers Pigou has lived and worked in South Africa since 1992 where he worked
at the Black Sash advice office in Johannesburg before joining PEACE ACTION in 1993,
and the Independent Board of Inquiry in 1994 where he monitored and conducted research
and investigations into political violence on the Reef. In October 1995 Piers joined the
Potchefstroom University’s legal aid clinic in the Vaal, where he ran a human rights legal aid 4
project, focusing on the use of torture by the police force. In April 1996 he joined the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission as a member of the investigation unit. In 1997, Piers joined
the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) and applied research NGO based in
Johannesburg (www.case.org.za). During 2000, Piers began working for the Centre for the
Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) where he was responsible for the co-ordination
of their IDRC funded Violence in Transition Project (VTP) (www.csvr.org.za). Between
January 2003 and December 2004, Piers worked on several projects in South Africa,
Zimbabwe and East Timor dealing with transitional justice, reconciliation, human rights and
accountability. During 2005, Piers worked at the Zimbabwe Torture Victims Project based in
Johannesburg. The Project provides medical, psychosocial, humanitarian and legal support to
primary victims of organized violence and torture from Zimbabwe. In January 2006. Piers
became the director of the South African History Archive (www.saha.org.za), an activist
archive dedicated to archiving past and contemporary struggles for justice in South Africa. In
June 2009, Piers will take on his new position as a Senior Associate for the International
Center for Transitional Justice with responsibility for Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe in
particular.

Jasmina Pjanic: Jasmina Pjanic is the Director of the Criminal Defence Section of the
Registry of the Court of BiH, which encompasses the War Crimes Chamber where serious
human rights and humanitarian law violations from the 1991-1995 war are prosecuted. She
was previously a national legal advisor in the Criminal Institutions and Prosecutorial Reform
Unit of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the
country’s chief civilian peace implementation agency. She has also worked as the Registrar
of the Constitutional and Legal Committee of the Upper House of the BiH Parliament,
advising on the constitutionality of laws in parliamentarian proceedings. A recipient of
several scholarships, Ms. Pjanic completed her LL.B at Sarajevo University Law School, and
obtained a European Regional Masters Degree in Democracy and Human Rights in South
East Europe from the University of Bologna and Sarajevo University.
Roster of Northern Ireland Speakers
Fiona Doherty: After studying law at Trinity College, Dublin Fiona Doherty was awarded a
Masters Degree in Human Rights Law with distinction from Queen’s University Belfast. She
was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1997 and to the Bar of Ireland in 2001. Fiona acted
as counsel for the families of three deceased and two wounded before the Bloody Sunday
Inquiry and for the applicants in the European Court of Human Rights cases of Kelly & ors,
Shanaghan, McShane and Finucane v UK. Fiona is a member of the General Council of the
Bar of Northern Ireland and a member of the Bar Council’s Human Rights Advisory
Committee. She was formerly chairperson of the Committee on the Administration of Justice
(CAJ) and served on CAJ’s executive committee for 12 years.

Jeremy Hill: former Legal Counsellor to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and former
British Ambassador to Lithuania and Bulgaria, Jeremy Hill was recently the legal advisor to
the Consultative Group on the Past.