Participants
Kamran Ali
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies; Director of the South Asia Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
Kamran Ali is an associate professor of Anthropology and Middle East studies, as well as the director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he taught at the University of Rochester, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden, The Netherlands. More recently he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin where he finished a book-length manuscript on the social history of the working class movement during Pakistan’s early years. Ali has published extensively on gender, health, and cultural history. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press, 2002), and the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (Palgrave, 2008) and Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (OUP, 2009), both with Martina Rieker, with whom he also coordinates the Shehr Network on Comparative Urban Landscapes. He also previously served as a human rights/forensic monitor for ONUSAL, United Nations Mission in El-Salvador. He earned his M.B.B.S. from the University of Karachi and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Helena Alviar García
Associate Professor and Dean, Faculty of Law, Universidad de los Andes
Helena Alviar García is an associate professor and the dean of the Faculty of Law at the Universidad de los Andes, where she was previously the director of the Doctorate and Master’s in Law programs. Professor Alviar has taught at universities in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, United States, and Italy. She has published extensively on administrative law, distribution law theory, economics, and feminist theory, including, “The Unending Quest for Land: The Tale of Broken Constitutional Promises” (Texas Law Review, 2010) and “Legal Reform, Social Policy, and Gendered Redistribution in Colombia: The Role of the Family” (American University Journal of Gender, Law, and Social Policy, 2011). Alviar earned a B.A. in law and a post-graduate certificate in financial legislation from the Universidad de los Andes and earned her LL.M. and her S.J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Daniel Brinks
Associate Professor; Co-Director, Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, The University of Texas at Austin
Daniel Brinks is an associate professor of government and co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the role of the law and courts in supporting or extending human rights and many of the basic rights associated with democracy, with a primary regional interest in Latin America. He is currently at work on a project that examines constitutional change in Latin America since about 1975, focusing especially on judicial institutions and constitutional review. He has published articles in journals such as Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, and the Texas International Law Journal. His books Courting Social Justice: The Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World (co-edited with Varun Gauri) and The Judicial Response to Police Violence in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law were both published by Cambridge University Press. Brinks received a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a J.D. from the University of Michigan.
Ruben Carranza
Director, Reparative Justice Program, The International Center for Transitional Justice
Ruben Carranza is the director of the Reparative Justice Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice. He currently works with victims’ communities and reparations policymakers in Nepal, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq, Palestine, Liberia, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya. He also provides advice on issues involving reparations and war crimes tribunals including the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the International Criminal Court. A native of the Philippines, he served as the commissioner in charge of litigation and investigation in the Philippine commission that successfully recovered $680 million in assets of the family of Ferdinand Marcos hidden in banks in Switzerland, the U.S., and other foreign countries. Carranza was also involved in litigation against the Marcos family by victims of human rights violations of the Marcos dictatorship. Previously, he was an assistant secretary of national defense in the Philippines, where he developed his expertise in security, peacebuilding, and conflict issues in Asia. He has done significant research, writing, and fieldwork on the relationship among transitional justice, corruption, and economic crimes. Carranza earned a B.A. and LL.B. from the University of the Philippines and an LL.M. from New York University.
Natalie Davidson
Doctoral Candidate, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
Natalie Davidson is a Ph.D. student at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation examines the impact of Alien Tort Statute litigation on the political communities in which the litigated abuses occurred, focusing on the representations of political violence which emerge from such litigation and the litigation’s construction in local public discourse. She also writes about transnational processual models for addressing corporate involvement in atrocity. Prior to her Ph.D. studies, Natalie taught French at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and practiced for 5 years in a law firm and then in-house in a large Israeli bank, negotiating cross-border corporate and financial transactions. She is a graduate of the joint LLB-Maîtrise program between King’s College London and Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and earned an LL.M. in Procedural Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dennis Davis
Judge, The High Court of Cape Town; Professor, University of Cape Town
Dennis Davis is a judge at the High Court of Cape Town and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court of Cape Town. He teaches constitutional law and tax law at the University of Cape Town. Davis is also a member of the Commission of Enquiry into Tax Structure of South Africa. His research focuses on constitutional law, socioeconomic rights, and human rights and litigation. He was a legal advisor on electoral law and federalism to the Constitutional Assembly during the formation of South Africa’s new constitution. He has been a visiting lecturer/professor at the Universities of Cambridge, Florida, Toronto and Harvard University, and currently hosts a South African television program on current political and economic issues entitled “Judge For Yourself.” Judge Davis has published over one hundred articles in academic journals and co-written eight books on a number of legal subjects including Rights and Constitutionalism (Jutas, 1994), Beyond Apartheid (Ravan, 1991), and Detention and Torture in South Africa (St. Martin’s, 1987). Judge Davis earned a B.Com LL.B. from the University of Cape Town and an M. Phil. from the University of Cambridge.
Ariel Dulitzky
Clinical Professor; Director, Human Rights Clinic, The University of Texas School of Law
Ariel Dulitzky is a clinical professor, director of the Human Rights Clinic, and director of the Latin America Initiative at the University of Texas School of Law. He is a leading expert in the inter-American human rights system, and in 2010 he was appointed to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Prior to joining the University of Texas, he was Assistant Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), where he also served as advisor to the IACHR’s first Special Rapporteur on Afro-Descendants that he helped establish in 2005, and as technical advisor to the OAS Working Group discussing the adoption of a new Inter-American Convention against Racial Discrimination. He has been a consultant for the Office of the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner and the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights. Dulitzky has directed the litigation of more than one hundred cases in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He has published extensively on human rights, the inter-American human rights system, racial discrimination and the rule of law in Latin America, including “The Inter-American Human Rights System Fifty Years Later: Time For Changes,” Special Edition, Revue québécoise de droit international (2011). Dulitzky received a J.D. from the University of Buenos Aires School of Law and an L.L.M. from Harvard Law School.
Karen Engle
Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law; Co-director & Founder, Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, The University of Texas School of Law
Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and the founder and co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches in the fields of public international law, international human rights law, and Latin American law. Her recent publications include “Self-Critique, (Anti) Politics and Criminalization: Reflections on the History and Trajectory of the Human Rights Movement,” in New Approaches to International Law: The European and the American Experiences (José María Beneyto and David Kennedy, eds.; Asser Press, 2012), The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), “On Fragile Architecture: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Context of Human Rights” (European Journal of International Law, 2011), and “The Force of Shame” (in Rethinking Rape Law, with Annelies Lottmann) (Routledge, 2010). Professor Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and an assignment as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bogotá in 2010. Engle received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an undergraduate degree from Baylor University.
Barbara Harlow
Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature, The University of Texas at Austin
Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial professor of English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, she taught at the American University in Cairo, Wesleyan University, University College Galway, University of Minnesota, and the University of Natal. Professor Harlow has published extensively on imperialism, orientalism, postcolonial studies, and human rights. Her recent works include “’The Geography and the Event’: Questions of Palestine and Their Eventual Jurisdiction” (Interventions, 2012), “’Extraordinary Renditions’: tales of Guantánamo, a review article” (Race and Class, 2011), “’No Short Cuts’: Landmines, HIV/Aids and Africa’s New Generation” in Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton, eds.; Carolina Academic Press, 2008), and “Sanctions against South Africa: Historical Example or Historic Exception?” in The Post-Colonial and the Global (Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, eds.; University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Professor Harlow is also the author of After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (Verso, 1996), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), and Resistance Literature (Methuen, 1987). She is currently working on a biography of the South African activist, Ruth First. Professor Harlow received a B.A. from Simmons College, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Jennifer Laurin
Professor, The University of Texas School of Law
Jennifer Laurin is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Previously, she spent several years as a litigation associate with the civil rights firm of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP (formerly Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, LLP), and served as a law clerk to Judge Thomas Griesa of the Southern District of New York and Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She is also the chair of the American Bar Association Texas Assessment Team on the death penalty, and a member of the National Police Accountability Project. Professor Laurin’s principal research interests lie at the intersections of criminal and constitutional litigation, and regulation of criminal justice institutions. Her publications include “Still Convicting the Innocent: Reviewing Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: When Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong,” (Texas Law Review, 2012) and “Rights Translation and Remedial Disequilibration in Constitutional Criminal Procedure,” (Columbia Law Review, 2010). Professor Laurin received a B.A. from Earlham College and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.
Zinaida Miller
Doctoral Candidate in International Relations, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Zinaida Miller is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her work over the past several years has critically examined the enterprise and literature of transitional justice. In particular, her work has investigated the ways in which the field of transitional justice has systematically and persistently failed to address questions of inequality and structural violence. She is currently working on an article on the role of international humanitarian aid in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of a larger project on the historical and legal role of international organizations in transitional contexts. Miller’s publications include “Settling with History: A Hybrid Commission of Inquiry for Israel/Palestine” (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2007) and “Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the Economic in Transitional Justice” (The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2008). Miller earned a B.A. from Brown University, an M.A. from Tufts University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Monika Nalepa
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Notre Dame University
Monika Nalepa is an assistant professor of political science at Notre Dame University and a visiting associate research scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. Nalepa previously taught at Rice University and was a post-doctoral scholar at Harvard. Her recent publications include “Tolerating Mistakes: How Do Popular Perceptions of Procedural Fairness Affect Demand for Transitional Justice?” (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2012), “Reconciliation, Refugee Returns, and the Impact of International Criminal Justice: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” in NOMOS, Proceedings of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (Williams, Nagy, and Elster, eds.; New York University Press, 2012), “Captured Commitments: An Analytic Narrative of Transitions with Transitional Justice” (World Politics, 2010), Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2010), “Punish All Perpetrators or Protect the Innocent? Comparing Systems of Transitional Justice” (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2008), “A Special Issue on Transitional Justice” (co-editor, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006), “Judging Transitional Justice: A New Criterion for Evaluating Truth Revelation Procedures” (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006) and “Strategic and Normative Aspects of Transitional Justice” (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006). Nalepa earned an M.A. from Warsaw University and an M.A, M.Phil, and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Vasuki Nesiah
Associate Professor of Practice, The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University
Vasuki Nesiah is associate professor of practice at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, where she teaches human rights, law and social theory, and international legal studies. Her main areas of research include the law and politics of international human rights and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transitional justice. Nesiah’s recent publications include “The Specter of Violence That Haunts The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (Maryland Journal of International Law, 2009), “Gender and Transitional Justice” (Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, 2006), and “From Berlin to Bonn: Militarization and Multilateral Decision-Making” (Harvard Human Rights Law Journal, 2004). Prior to joining NYU, Nesiah taught in the International Relations and Gender Studies concentrations at Brown University, where she also served as Director of International Affairs. Nesiah previously spent several years in practice at the International Center for Transitional Justice, where she was the founder and head of the Gender Program, as well as the country lead for South Africa, India, Ghana, Nepal, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Nesiah serves on the editorial committees of the journals Feminist Legal Studies and the London Review of International Law. She also serves on the International Advisory Board of the Institute of International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne, and is an Associate Fellow with the Asia Society. Nesiah earned a B.A. from Cornell University, a J.D. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, and received a post-doctoral fellowship in human rights from Columbia Law School.
Dianne Otto
Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School
Dianne Otto is a professor of law and director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School. Her research focuses on public international law, human rights law, and critical legal theory, with a current emphasis on gender and sexuality issues in the context of the UN Security Council, peacekeeping, and international human rights law. Otto previously helped draft a General Comment on women’s equality for the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and a General Recommendation on treaty obligations for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Her publications include “Remapping Crisis Through a Feminist Lens” in Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance? (Kouvo and Pearson, eds.; Onati/Hart, 2011), “Power and Danger: Feminist engagement with International Law through the UN Security Council” (Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2010), and “The Exile of Inclusion: Reflections on Gender Issues in International Law Over the Last Decade” (The Melbourne Journal of International Law, 2009). She has also edited three volumes on Gender Issues and Human Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming 2013) and prepared a bibliographic chapter, ‘Feminist Approaches’ for Oxford Bibliographies Online: International Law (2012). She sits on the advisory boards of Third World Legal Studies, Melbourne Journal of International Law, The London Review of International Law, The Third World and International Law, and the Australian Yearbook of International Law. Otto earned a B.A. from the University of Adelaide, an LL.B. and LL.M. from the University of Melbourne, and an LL.M. and J.S.D from Columbia University.
Fredy Peccerelli
Executive Director, Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation
Fredy Peccerelli is the Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala). Peccerelli and his team have exhumed hundreds of mass graves over the past twenty years. He is currently managing the excavation of bonepits at La Verbena cemetery, searching for forcibly disappeared among the remains of those buried as John and Jane Doe’s. Using cutting-edge scientific tools, he has been able to identify victims of the Guatemalan genocide, gathering evidence for use in court and also providing closure to family members. In addition to his work in Guatemala, he has directed investigations in the former Yugoslavia (Srebrenica) and testified as an expert witness on genocide before international tribunals, including the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In 1999, Time Magazine and CNN named him as one of the fifty Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium. He is the recipient of the 2004 Science and Human Rights Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 2008 New York Academy of Sciences Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights Award, and the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Peccerelli received a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in Forensic Anthropology at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
Hani Sayed
Assistant Professor of Law, American University in Cairo
Hani Sayed is an assistant professor of law and a member at the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University in Cairo. His research interests include law and economic development, international economic law, and legal and political theory. Previously, he taught at Brandeis University and practiced law in both Damascus and New York. He has also worked as a researcher at the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research and served as a visiting scholar at Cornell University Law School. His publications include “Fear of Arrest” in The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Haddad, Bsheer, and Abu-Rish, eds.; Pluto Press, 2012). Sayed earned an LL.B. from Damascus Law School, a D.E.S in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Patricia Viseur Sellers
Special Advisor on Prosecution Strategies to the Prosecutor of the ICC; Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, University of Oxford; former Legal Advisor for Gender-Related Crimes and Acting senior trial Attorney, Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY
Patricia Viseur Sellers is an international criminal lawyer and the Special Advisor for Prosecution Strategies to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Ms. Sellers is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. From 1994 until 2007, she served as the Legal Advisor for Gender-Related Crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She was the chief legal strategist and prosecuting trial attorney in the landmark cases of Furundzija, Akayesu and Kunarac that recognized rape and other forms of sexual violence as war crimes, as crimes against humanity (including enslavement), and as genocide. In 2011, as an independent legal expert, she testified before the Spanish investigating judge in the Guatemalan genocide case. She has been a Special Legal Consultant to the Gender and Women’s Rights Division of the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the Secretary General’s Special Representative to Children in Armed Conflict. Sellers also advises civil society organizations and served as a story consultant to the producers of the PBS series, “Women, War and Peace.” Her publications include “Wartime Female Slavery: Enslavement?” (Cornell Journal of International Law, 2011), “Individual(’s) Liability for Collective Sexual Violence” in Gender and Human Rights (Karen Knop, ed.; Oxford University Press, 2004), and “The Context of Sexual Violence: Sexual Violence as Violations of International Humanitarian Law” in Substantive and Procedural Aspects of International Criminal Law (McDonald and Swaak-Goldman, eds.; Kluwer, 2000). Sellers earned a B.A. from Rutgers University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, an Honorary Doctorate in Law from City University of New York, and is a recipient of the American Society of International Law’s prominent Women in International Law award.
Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso
Professor of Law, Faculdade de Direito do Sul de Minas
Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso is a professor of law at the Faculdade de Direito do Sul de Minas, where she teaches international law. She is also a lecturer at the São Paulo Law School of Fundação Getulio Vargas, where she teaches international law in the Executive Education Program. Veçoso recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of São Paulo Law School, debating the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on amnesties. Previously, she was a Doctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests focus on the Inter-American System of Human Rights, regionalism and Latin America, and the history and theory of international law. Her publications include “The Inter-American System as New Grossraum? Assessing the Case Law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights”, written with professor Alberto do Amaral Jr. (ESIL Conference Paper Series, 2011), and The International Law Commission and the fragmentation of international law: antecedents of the report ‘Fragmentation of international law: difficulties arising from the diversification and expansion of international law’ (Juruá, 2009). She is also the editor of International Law in Context (Saraiva, 2012), in which she published “The adhesion of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights: challenges and perspectives concerning human rights protection in Europe” and “Assessing international regimes.” Veçoso earned her LL.B. and LL.M. from the University of São Paulo Law School.