'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'How many women would be enough?' Sawyer asked.
'Nine,' Ginsburg replied with a smile. 'There've been nine men there for a long time, right? So why not nine women?'

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (center) (prior IntLawGrrls posts), in conversation with ABC TV News' Diane Sawyer (left). (Hat tip to Professor Sally Kenney, Executive Director, Newcomb College Institute and Newcomb College Endowed Chair, Tulane University, via IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin) The conversation, video of which is available here, took place last October during a California conference on women. Also on the dais was the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor (above, right), who retired in 2005 from her post as the 1st woman Justice. Today, of course, there are 3 -- in addition to Ginsburg, newcomer Justices Sonia Sotomayor (prior posts) and Elena Kagan (prior posts). Of this development, O'Connor said:

'I've got to tell you, I went to the Supreme Court recently... I sat in on an argument, and I looked up at the bench on which I sat for 25 years, and what did I see? I saw on the far right, a woman. On the far left side, a woman. And here in the middle, a woman. And it was dazzling.'

Write On! Transitional justice amid conflict

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers)

Paper proposals are being sought for The Potential Role of Transitional Justice in Active Conflicts: An International Conference to be held from November 13 to 15, 2011, in Jerusalem. The conference will launch a series of conferences in the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University will employ a broad, interdisciplinary approach and use the comparative experience of other societies and international experts to explore transitional justice.
This 1st conference will examine the potential impact of transitional justice mechanisms while conflicts are still ongoing. Chairing the planning committee is Dr. Tomer Broude of Hebrew University; other planners include IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Professor Ruti Teitel of New York Law School. Questions that may be addressed at the conference include (full list is in the call for papers):
► Are there conditions in which mechanisms of transitional justice can make a positive contribution to the cessation of violence and human rights infringements?
► Can state-led transitional justice mechanisms be formed during ongoing conflict, or will lack of political will, economic conditions, and the need to prioritize other objectives such as security, make any efforts in this direction ineffective?
► What lessons can be learned from cases in which transitional justice was pursued while the guns were not yet silent, such as in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or in the International Criminal Court's intervention in the situation in Darfur?
► Are certain transitional justice mechanisms more suitable for application to ongoing conflicts?
► What about informal, as opposed to state-led, processes?
► Specifically in our local context, can transitional justice mechanisms assist in reaching greater reconciliation and coexistence between Israeli Jews and Arabs? Authors of selected proposals will be offered full or partial flight and accommodation expenses. It's anticipated that the conference will result in the publication of a dedicated volume or journal issue.
Deadline is May 1, 2011, for submission of 2-page proposals, plus CV, via e-mail to mchr@savion.huji.ac.il. Details here.

Gender and Disaster

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Fionnuala Ni Aoláin, who contributes this guest post)

Given recent events in Japan it seems like an opportune moment to reflect on the gendered dimensions of natural and other kinds of disasters. The reflections here are part of a more sustained analysis I make in an article forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law entitled "Women, Vulnerability and Humanitarian Emergencies."
The catastrophic dimensions of humanitarian emergencies are increasingly understood and more visible to states and international institutions. There is also some recognition of the gendered dimensions of humanitarian emergencies in policy and institutional contexts.
It is generally acknowledged that women are overrepresented in the refugee and internally displaced communities that typically result from many humanitarian crises. Women bear acute care responsibilities in most societies, and also disproportionately bear familial and communal care responsibilities in communities affected by disaster, war and natural emergencies. Women, given their disparate social and legal status in many jurisdictions, may have less access to capital, social goods and other legal means to protect themselves when crises arise. While tacit acknowledgement of this reality increasingly permeates academic and political discourses, the depth of the descriptive often fails to capture and fully grasp the extent of gender harms and gender insecurity.
Moreover, as experts and policymakers calculate how best national and international communities should respond to such emergencies, women are frequently substantively and procedurally sidelined. This follows from the dual effects of a dearth of women decisionmakers in the relevant high-level fora and the failure to meaningfully imagine and include solutions to the particular issues affecting women in communities emerging from various emergencies. Disaster-related research suffers from considerable bias, revealing an asymmetrical distribution of gender themes, an absence of data on women’s lives and a male bias in identifying the channels from which information is sought.
The recent events in Japan offer us further opportunity to reflect on the intersection of women’s experiences with situations of humanitarian crisis. My goal is to give greater traction to a feminist analysis of women’s experiences in situations of extremity.
In particular, I argue that in order to fully understand the context of women’s specific vulnerabilities, we have to widen and deepen the frame of investigation. In short, we need to take account of pre-existing conditions. We must start by contextualizing the ordinary experiences shaping women’s lives, which form the bedrock upon which a specific crisis is then foisted. The specificity of vulnerabilities subsequently identified in the moment of crisis can only be completely understood and fully addressed by reference to the backdrop. But, accepting the reality of such situated vulnerability does not take us far enough. Institutionalizing helplessness and propagating its inevitability continues to perpetuate a conceptual framework that fails to address the underlying causes of women vulnerability in situations of extremity. This requires a more nuanced approach, seeing compounded vulnerabilities for women in which prior discrimination, exclusion and social marginalization interplay with the specific harms and vulnerabilities foisted on women in situations of crisis. These two elements [the prior and the present] are in constant interplay. Moreover unless experts accept the predictability of such crises their planning will suffer from obvious, gender-biased defects.
By extending and reframing our understanding of why vulnerability is pronounced for women we may both expose and address the limits of current international legal obligations in addressing women’s harms and needs in the context of humanitarian crises. We do so by returning to basics, addressing the persistent social, economic and political discriminations that are routine for most women in most societies, most of the time.

(photos from post-tsunami Japan (c) 2011 Associated Press, available in slide show here)

Absence of women's authorial voices

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, who contributes this guest post)

In recent years, feminist international law scholars have wondered if we will ever be more than "a decorative frill on the edge of the discipline." in the apt phrase of IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth.
With that in mind, we take note that an event yesterday on "What Makes a Great International Law Article," hosted by the American Society of International Law. Five of the most cited articles from the past decade were picked out in order to guide conversation on the topic. They were:

► Eric Stein, "International Integration and Democracy No Love at First Sight," 95 American Journal of International Law 489 (2001);
► Paul C. Szasz, "The Security Council Starts Legislating," 96 American Journal of International Law 901 (2002);
► Ryan Goodman, "Human Rights Treaties, Invalid Reservations, and State Consent," 96 American Journal of International Law (2002);
► W. Michael Reisman, "Assessing Claims to Revise the Laws of War," 97 American Journal of International Law 82 (2003); and
► Harold Hongju Koh, "International Law as Part of Our Law," 98 American Journal of International Law 43 (2004).

The notable absence of women in the list is surprising.
It is especially surprising given that international law scholars Christine Bell (another IntLawGrrls guest/alumna), Allison Marston Danner and Anthea Roberts have all garnered the Deák Prize for meritorious scholarship published in the American Journal of International Law, in 2007, 2004 and 2002 respectively.
On a positive note, the panel leading the discussion included two women: one prominent international law scholar and AJIL editor, Dinah Shelton, and AJIL Managing Editor Julie Furgerson.

Women & ICL series continues

Our readers will recall that this past fall, IntLawGrrls co-sponsored our first symposium along with the American Society of International Law, on the topic of Women and International Criminal Law (full program here).
The papers featured at this symposium will be published in a special 2011 issue of the International Criminal Law Review dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald, an IntLawGrrls guest/alumna. Some papers were commissioned; others we received through a global call to papers. We've been spotlighting these papers over the last few months -- Diane Marie Amann's post on her paper is here, Jaya Ramji-Nogales' post on hers is here, and that of Dina Francesca Haynes, Naomi Cahn, and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is here. Jaya's paper, also subject of an earlier post, is now available online here. We'll continue to post these as we move into the production phase.
Today we feature another paper, posted below, by Margaret deGuzman (left), another IntLawGrrls alumna and Assistant Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia. We're delighted to welcome her back. Meg's paper engages the question of "Why Should International Courts Prosecute Sex Crimes?" The full paper, available here, is part of her ongoing work on gravity as an organizing principle for international criminal law and prosecutorial discretion.

Today's Guest Bloggers: Christine Bell and Catherine O’Rourke

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome as today's guest bloggers Christine Bell (left) and Dr. Catherine O'Rourke (right), colleagues at the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.
► Christine serves as an Associate Director of the Institute (along with IntLawGrrls alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin), and also is a Professor of Public International Law at the university's Magee campus in Derry. She's the previous Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law at Queen's University in Belfast, her hometown. After reading law at Selwyn College, Cambridge, England, Christine earned an LL.M from Harvard Law School, supported by a Harkness Fellowship. Both a barrister and an attorney, she practiced for a period at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. She's served as chairperson of Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, as a founding member of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, and as a member of the European Commission’s Committee of Experts on Fundamental Rights. She has taken part in various peace negotiations discussions, and given advice and training to diplomats, mediators, and lawyers.
In 2007, Christine was a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Her 2006 article "Peace Agreements: Their Nature and Legal Status" won the Francis Deák Prize, awarded annually "to a younger author for meritorious scholarship published in The American Journal of International Law." Among her other publications are 2 books: On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria (2008) and Peace Agreements and Human Rights (2000).
► Catherine is a Lecturer in Human Rights and International Law at the University of Ulster and Gender Research Coordinator at its Transitional Justice Institute. She earned her LLB (Law and Politics) from Queen's University Belfast, her MSc Gender and Development from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics, and her PhD from the University of Ulster. This past November, the Politics Studies Association of Ireland gave Catherine the Basil Chubb Prize, recognizing the year's best PhD thesis undertaken in Ireland in any field of politics, for her dissertation, "The Law and Politics of Gender in Transition: A Feminist Exploration of Transitional Justice in Chile, Northern Ireland and Colombia" (supervised by Christine and by Dr. Carmel Roulston, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Ulster). Catherine's other publications are here.
A Visiting Scholar in 2007-08 at American University School of International Service in Washington, D.C., Catherine also has been a Visiting Researcher at the law schools of Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She's been active in Amnesty International's Stop Violence Against Women campaign, provided guidance to the Northern Ireland women's sector on the Bill of Rights drafting process, and participated as a gender and security sector reform expert at the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice.
In their guest post below, Christine and Catherine discuss the contents and analyze the findings of their empirical research into what impact, if any, U.N. Security Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women and Peace and Security may have had on negotiation and drafting of peace agreements.
Christine and Catherine dedicate their post to Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam (below left), who died from a brain tumor in 2005, at age 55. Mowlam, Christine and Catherine write, was

a British Member of Parliament and the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during the peace negotiations and production of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. She was one of the first women negotiators of a peace process, brought a different style to the process, and as we now know, did so while fighting cancer of the brain. Whether one agrees with her role as British Secretary of State, she was a powerful, innovative and feminist woman whose remarkable ways of communication played a key role in achieving a peace settlement. All sides would acknowledge her impact. She suffered political marginalization as a women due to her success and had she lived would undoubtedly be one of the woman who could have played a key mediation role in other conflicts.

Today Mowlam joins IntLawGrrls' other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Megan Fairlie

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Megan Fairlie (left) as today's guest blogger.
An Assistant Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law, Megan's currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Albany Law School. She previously taught on the LL.B. and LL.M. programmes at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she was a member of the Transitional Justice Institute, under the directorship of IntLawGrrl’s guest/alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. Prior to teaching in Belfast, Megan was a doctoral fellow at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway, where she earned her LL.M. in International Peace Support Operations and her Ph.D. in International Human Rights Law. Megan has since returned to Galway a number of times to teach at, the Centre’s International Criminal Court Summer School. Megan earned her J.D. with honors from Washington and Lee University School of Law, Lexington, Virginia.
She teaches courses including Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, International Criminal Procedure and a seminar on the International Criminal Court, and her publications reflect those specialties. In her guest post below, Megan writes about her forthcoming article on the relationship between the United States and the International Criminal Court.
Megan sits on the board of Self Help Africa-USA, a charity is designed to assist rural communities in Africa to become self sustaining. It focuses in particular on supporting women via business and microcredit programs.
Heartfelt welcome!

Criminal Justice for Gendered Violence and Beyond

Many of us gathered at the American Society of International Law on October 29th to honor the remarkable Judge Patricia Wald by bringing together our perspectives on women and international criminal law. IntLawGrrls Naomi Cahn and Dina Francesca Haynes, and guest Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (pictured below right) presented our paper on Criminal Justice for Gendered Violence and Beyond, drawing concepts from our forthcoming book, On the Frontlines, to be published by Oxford University Press in September 2011.

In the article, which will be part of a special volume of the International Criminal Law Review edited by IntLawGrrls Diane Marie Amann, Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Beth Van Schaack, we argue: 1) that sexual offenses that arise during and post conflict are not yet sufficiently addressed, 2) that even so, the focus on sex crimes diverts attention from accurately assessing the actual harms perceived by women and 3) that legal reform and post conflict reconstruction should precede the creation of tribunals.
Our responses to sexual offenses committed during and after conflict are still insufficient in multiple ways. Though the jurisprudence of the ICTY and ICTR has taken us some distance, courts still fail to capture the full range of harms that flow from sexual violence. Furthermore, the successful prosecution of sex based crimes still requires significant external pressure and advocacy, multiple structural barriers still exist with the gathering of evidence and protection of witnesses, and the sentences and number of cases pursued is still disproportionately lower than other wartime offenses. Despite the failures in sufficiently addressing wartime sex based offenses, the focus on sex crimes as the crime associated with women and war diverts attention and resources from properly assessing what women truly perceive as harm and accordingly limit our ability to redress those harms. Finally, the timeline for pursuing prosecutions is not yet in sync with post war “safety.” Tribunals are established before women and victims of war have developed any sense of security. Accordingly, we recommend that legal reform and post conflict reconstruction processes should precede the creation of criminal tribunals.

Top 100 'Grrl

Cheers to IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, honored earlier this month on the Irish Legal 100, an annual list compiled by the New York-based Irish America magazine. (Married as I am to an honoree on another of the magazine's lists -- a Top 100 Irish American -- I took special note of this award.)
As detailed in prior posts, Fionnuala's the Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Planning and Research at the University of Minnesota Law School, Minneapolis, as well as Professor of Law at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and cofounder and Director of the university's Transitional Justice Institute. A noted scholar in areas of gender, armed conflict, and states of emergency, she contributed a post this summer on the release of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry report on the 1972 paratrooper killings of civilians in Derry. And we're delighted that she will join her coauthors, IntLawGrrls Naomi Cahn and Dina Francesca Haynes, to discuss their paper, "Criminal Justice for Gendered Violence and Beyond," at the "Women and International Criminal Law" conference that IntLawGrrls is hosting this Friday in Washington.

Heartfelt congratulations!

Princeton law fellowships

The Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, whose Director is our colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, is seeking applications from outstanding faculty, independent scholars, lawyers, and judges for up to 6 residential LAPA Fellowships to be awarded for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Past Fellows include many international or comparative law scholars, including a number of IntLawGrrls' guests/alumnae: Jeannine Bell (prior posts), Mary L. Dudziak (prior posts), Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (prior posts), and Diane Orentlicher (prior posts).
Successful candidates for the 2011-2012 awards will conduct substantial research on topics broadly related to legal studies. Among the Fellows will be 4 general Fellows, 1 Microsoft/LAPA Fellow specializing in intellectual property or the legal regulation of the economy, and 1 Mellon/LAPA Fellow specializing in law and the humanities.
Applicants must have a doctorate, J.D., or equivalent postgraduate degree.
Details and the online application form are available here. Deadline is 5 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, November 8, 2010.

The Creation of International Law

Greetings from Oslo, where a number of IntLawGrrls (members, guests, and alumnae) are participating in a conference organized by Cecilia Bailliet and others at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law on The Creation of International Law: An Exploration of Normative Innovation, Contextual Application, and Interpretation in a Time of Flux.

Participants include the following women in international law (IntLawGrrls have a * next to their names):

► Henriette Aasen - University of Bergen
► Montserrat Abad - Carlos III University of Madrid
► Sumudu Atapattu (above left) - University of Wisconsin
► * Karima Bennoune (left) Rutgers School of Law, Newark
► * Rebecca M. Bratspies (right, in black) - CUNY School of Law
► Catherine Brölmann (below, in blue) - University of Amsterdam


►* Doris Buss - Carleton University
► Rosemary Byrne (right, with scarf) - Trinity College Dublin
► Christine Byron - Cardiff Law School (below left, in purple)
►* Hilary Charlesworth (below, in white) - Australian National University

► *Fiona de Londras (below) - University College Dublin
► Katherine Del Mar (below right) - University of Geneva
► Malgosia Fitzmaurice - Queen Mary University of London School of Law
► Anne Hellum - University of Oslo
► Agnieszka Jachec-Neale (below right, in front of window) - School of Oriental and Asian Studies
► Edda Kristjansdottir - Amsterdam Law School
► Catharine MacKinnon - Harvard Law School/U. Michigan Law School
► Claudia Martin - AU Washington College of Law
► *Fionnuala Ni Aoláin - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Phoebe Okawa (right) - Queen Mary University School of Law
► *Hari M. Osofsky - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Inger Johanne Sand - University of Oslo
► Kirsten Sandberg (right, in green) - University of Oslo
► Birgit Schlütter - Norwegian Center for Human Rights
► Hitomi Takemura - NUI Galway & Kyusha International University
► * Beth Van Schaack - Santa Clara University School of Law
► Maria Varaki - PhD candidate, NUI Galway; Irish Centre for Human Rights

Stay tuned for additional postings from the conference.

Guest Blogger: Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (left) as today's guest blogger.
Fionnuala holds the Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Planning and Research at the University of Minnesota Law School, Minneapolis. She's also Professor of Law at the University of Ulster and cofounder and Director of the university's Transitional Justice Institute, with offices in Belfast and Derry, respectively the largest and 2d-largest cities in Northern Ireland.
In her guest post below, she discusses the release last week of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry report on the 1972 paratrooper killings of civilians in Derry, placing the event in the context of transitional justice discourse.
Fionnuala's previously been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School, Visiting Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Associate Professor of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Law & Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. She received her LL.B. and Ph.D. from the Law Faculty at Queen's University in Belfast, and also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia.
As is evident from her list of publications (SSRN here), Fionnuala's an internationally published expert and scholar in the areas of human rights, gender, and other issues related to transitional justice, on feminist legal theory, and on states of emergency. Law in Times of Crisis (2006), which she co-authored with Minnesota Law Professor Oren Gross, received a 2007 Certificate of Merit from the American Society of International Law, the organization for which she just began a 3-year term as a member of the ASIL Executive Council. She's at work now on a book on gender, masculinities, and transitional justice, co-authored with IntLawGrrls Dina Francesca Haynes and Naomi Cahn.
Fionnuala's many awards include a Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann Scholarship, a European Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship.
The Irish government twice has nominated her to the European Court of Human Rights. Fionnuala served as a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission by appointment of the Minister of Justice, from 2000 to 2005. She remains an elected member of the Executive Committee for the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, and is also a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
She's just been invited to serve on the U.N. Roster of Experts for the Crisis Communications Unit, having already taken part: in a 2008 Expert Seminar organized by the Working Group "Protecting human rights while countering terrorism" of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force; in 2003 as U.N. Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making; and from 1996 to 1997 as a representative of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia.
Fionnuala dedicates her post to the woman who was IntLawGrrls' 1st transnational foremother, whose anglicized name is Grace O'Malley (a favorite not only of yours truly, but also of IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Gráinne de Búrca). (credit for photo of statue of O'Malley on grounds of Westport House, County Mayo, Ireland) Referring to Grace by her Irish name, Fionnuala writes that

Gráinne Ní Mháille (c. 1530 – c. 1603), also known as Granuaile, was an important figure in Irish folklore and a historical figure in 16th century Irish History. While primarily viewed as a romantic and complex female pirate figure she represents for me a figure of feminist agency in a highly patriarchial society with much vigor and uniqueness in her tapestry of her life's story and choices.

Heartfelt welcome!

Bloody Sunday – Setting the Truth Free

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

After decades of legal and political struggle to vindicate the innocence of thirteen persons killed during a civil rights protest in Derry on January 30 1972, known as Bloody Sunday, the report by the Hon Lord Saville of Newdigate was released last week to their families and a watchful local and global community.
The Report of the The Bloody Sunday Inquiry spans 10 volumes. As previously posted on IntLawGrrls, it is unequivocal that the deaths were “unjustified and unjustifiable” and that all those shot were innocent civilians who had given no cause for the use of force again them by members of the British paratroop regiment.
The symbolism of the Report’s delivery last Tuesday was deeply significant.
A packed house in the British House of Parliament in London and the crowd of which I was a part, at Guildhall Square in Derry (above left) -- both at centre stage -- waited and watched. (photo credit)
A newly elected and conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron (below right), in a speech before the House of Commons, gave no political space for dissension. (photo credit) He confirmed that the army had fired the first shots; that no warnings were given before the soldiers opened fire; that none of the casualties were posing a threat; that soldiers lied about their actions; and that on behalf of the government and the country he was “deeply sorry”.
The Saville Inquiry was first commissioned by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 as part of the then-embryonic Northern Ireland peace process – a confidence-building measure aimed largely at the nationalist community, whose faith in the rule of law and the neutrality of the state had been seriously undermined by the events of that day, and the subsequent and much derided inquiry by Lord Widgery which had exonerated the soldiers and the state of responsibility.
The 12-year length of the Saville Inquiry proceedings was testimony to the complexity of the terrain it traversed, as well as to the continual obstacles placed in the way of proceeding by Britain's Ministry of Defence.
The Inquiry's outcome was unexpected for its clarity, for its directness, and for the starkness of its findings. It also tenaciously confirms the importance of redeeming and affirming the truth of contentious actions by the state.
The Report is received in the context of an ongoing political transition in a post-conflict society. It immediately raises the question of what comes next?
An obvious question is whether the prosecution of soldiers for offences of murder or manslaughter for their actions on the day by Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service will be sought. Despite the clarity of Saville’s report, success is less certain in an adversarial setting. Fair trial concerns for soldiers, the admissibility of hearsay evidence, the passage of time, as well as undertakings given by the Attorney-General in 1999 that witnesses who provided evidence to the inquiry would be protected, all pose prosecutorial challenges. It seems more likely that prosecution of witnesses (specifically soldiers) for perjury would be successful given the depth and scope of evidence in the report itself. The families of the dead and the wounded have stated that they will take some time to read and consider the report before making calls for further specific legal steps.
But, in a wider context, the report has significant precedential importance for transitional societies.
It demonstrates the capacity of determined victims to successfully challenge and force the state to account for its actions in violating human rights norms. In this, it has given great impetus to other families and communities who experienced human rights violations during the same conflict (including further incidents involving the same paratroop regiment). While the Prime Minister may have fervently hoped that Saville closes the circle of inquiry – it may well be that it has exploded the calls to deal fully with the “past” of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Nonetheless, it is an important vindication of the state – particularly for the democratic state that has engaged in serious human rights violations – as the Report breathes life into the capacity of the rule of law to respond adequately and meaningfully to harms experienced by its citizens.
This was deeply evident last Tuesday on the streets of Derry – as a community that has been largely alienated from the state clapped and cheered a British Prime Minister acknowledging the faults of the state and seeking forgiveness.
In this, the Report also underpins the symbolic and communicative function of law – in its capacity to mend and offer individuals the means to heal deep harms and to bring communities “in” rather than to leave them out. Lord Saville's Report is both symbolically and practically important – for Northern Ireland and other conflicted societies addressing the past.
The debate on “dealing with the past” in Northern Ireland has not likely been closed by this important report. Rather, it opens up the possibility of deeper and more sustained engagement as the transition goes forward.

IntLawGrrl interviewed

Congrats to IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn, subject of an anthropologyworks blog interview regarding On the Front Lines: Gender, War and the Post Conflict Process, the book she's writing along with IntLawGrrl Dina Francesca Haynes and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin.
Check out the interview here.

Gender, masculinities & post-conflict transition

As IntLawGrrl Amy Senier posted last fall, the United Nations is seeking to consolidate all U.N. agencies and divisions that address women's issues into a single entity. One of the issues that this new agency will certainly deal with is the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions on which IntLawGrrls have posted, in particular:
► Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace, and Security, and, more recently,
► Resolutions 1820 (2008) and 1888 (2009) on sexual violence and armed conflict.
As IntLawGrrl Dina Francesca Haynes, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, and I explore in Gender, Masculinities and Transition in Conflicted Societies, a paper on SSRN that is part of our larger project on gender and post-conflict societies, while conflict can provide a gender dividend for women, in most contexts the result of conflict for most women is a negative sum. Specifically:
► Economies stall during and after conflict, or they operate in black and grey markets where women are the least often employed or employable because of their legally enforced second-class status.
► Across most post-conflict transitions, women are the first to be fired and the last to be hired, with the large exception of the false (and temporary) economy built up around the presence of the international community, in which women are paid to fill the “camp follower” positions as housekeepers, cooks, administrators and, of course, for sex.
► Women and children also constitute the overwhelming number of refugees, and of people displaced from their home communities. The very fact of war can contribute to undermining the limited social stability and security of women in many societies, which is the precursor to any exertion of economic or social autonomy. (credit for 2009 photo (c) UNICEF of Central African Republic women waiting to register with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees at the Daha, Chad, refugee camp)
Issues related to the emergence of certain kinds of “hyper” masculinity in situations of conflict and in subsequent peacebuilding are critical to exploring the impact of conflict on women. The article argues that a failure to account for and be cognizant of these specific masculinities has a significant effect for women in particular, as well as the success of the conflict transition process. Finally, we show the critically significant impact of a gender lens by considering the effect of violent masculinities on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs.

Go On! Women, peacebuilding & the rule of law

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) On behalf of WILIG, the Women in International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, we are delighted to announce the following program: "Women, Peacebuilding, and Advancing the Rule of Law," to be held 6:30-8:30 p.m. on September 30, 2009, at Tillar House, ASIL's headquarters, at 2223 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.
Cosponsors along with WILIG are ASIL's Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Interest Group, Vital Voices, the American Bar Association's International Law Section, Africa Committee and the Women's Interest Network, the Institute for Inclusive Security, and Women in International Security.
Women are an important part of the peacebuilding equation. Too often they are excluded or marginalized in the peace process. Limiting or excluding women from the peacebuilding process in a meaningful way not only leaves a critical resource untapped, but hinders a society's recovery. Women can be agents of change, advocates for justice and peace, and leaders in reestablishing rule of law. (credit for 2008 photo by I. Vuni of women at Uganda peace talks in Juba, Sudan)
Program Chair and Moderator is Melanne A. Civic, Senior Rule of Law Advisor at the U.S. Secretary of State's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, who is on detail to the Center for Complex Operations, National Defense University.
The panelists, who will discuss the critical role of women in peacebuilding as well as comment on the July 2009 Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008), "Women and Peace and Security," are:
►Melanne Verveer, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, who is also the cofounder and former CEO of Vital Voices;
►Swanee Hunt, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Austria between 1993 and 1997 and now is Chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security (formerly Women Waging Peace); and
►Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and Director of the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster in the North of Ireland.
Details and registration here.

New IntLawGrrls: WILIG Co-Chairs Naomi Cahn & Ruthanne Deutsch

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome as new bloggers the Co-Chairs of the Women in International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, better known as WILIG.
Naomi Cahn (right) and Ruthanne Deutsch (left) will be posting throughout the year about WILIG's events. (Ruthanne's joined Naomi as WILIG co-chair now that IntLawGrrl Susana SáCouto's become a WILIG co-chair emerita.)
The co-chairs' 1st post, the Go On! item below, announces a terrific upcoming program at ASIL headquarters, entitled "Gender Issues, International Law, and the New Administration." What's more, we're pleased to announce that Naomi also will post individually at IntLawGrrls.
Naomi is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. Her scholarship focuses on family law, feminist jurisprudence, and reproductive technology. Her most recent book is Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Markets Need Legal Regulation (New York University Press 2009), and she's at work co-authoring a book on post-conflict and gender with IntLawGrrl Dina Francesca Haynes and our colleague Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. Naomi's both a Senior Fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and a member of Yale Law School's Cultural Cognition Project, which examines public attitudes towards gay and lesbian parenting. From 2002 to 2004, she was on leave in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before entering academic in 1993, she'd practiced at the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson and at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services. She earned a B.A. from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a J.D. from Columbia, and an LL.M. from Georgetown.
Ruthanne, an expert in constitutional law and public international law, practices as associate in the Washington office of Sidley & Austin. There she's taken part in briefing and preparing: cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and other appellate courts; and international trade matters before the U.S. Court of International Trade and the World Trade Organization. Ruthanne was graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she's been a Global Law Scholar, an Executive Articles Editor for the law journal, and a Dean’s Visiting Scholar. She served as a law clerk to Judge Timothy B. Dyk, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Before embarking on her law career, Ruthanne had been an international development economist at the World Bank and at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Heartfelt welcome!

Scholars state detention changes

Seems everyone has notions these days about how to close the detention camp for terrorist suspects that the Bush Administration opened on January 11, 2002. Some are included in a report by a coalition of more than 20 organizations, entitled Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress. IntLawGrrls’ own Fiona de Londras, in an excellent post, recently offered hers. I’ve my own, too, and will post them in due course. They begin with a pre-eminent concern, on which I posted more than a year ago. In closing Guantánamo as he has promised to do, the new President also must close “Guantánamo” – the abusive policies of detention, interrogation, and rendition now given that metaphoric label even if in point of fact they occur far away from the 45 square miles that comprise the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. (12/08 photo of Camp Justice, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by Diane Marie Amann)
Today’s post is intended to point readers to the Scholars’ Statement of Principles for the New President on U.S. Detention Policy: An Agenda for Change. Drafted by our colleague Catherine Powell, also author of a human rights Blueprint on which we’ve posted, and signed by more than 2 dozen other scholars, among them yours truly, IntLawGrrl Jenny Martinez, and our colleagues Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Sarah H. Cleveland, Deborah Pearlstein, Hope Metcalf, Martha Minow, Judith Resnik, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, and Ruti Teitel. The Statement begins with an explication of how “the existing detention system,” -- “viewed as unprincipled, unreliable, and illegitimate” -- “undermines our national security.” It then sets forth 4 principles on which any new policy ought to be based:
► Observe the rule of law
► Liberty is the norm
► Individualized process
► Transparency
Then follows a host of recommendations for the new administration. As one would expect, it calls on the President to “Close Guantánamo” – to close it in the broader sense. Detainees who can be released are to be released; those should be prosecuted are to be transferred to the United States for prosecution before “established U.S. courts,” and not the military commissions. The Statement urges the Administration to attend to U.S. detention at other sites, “primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It calls for an end to extraordinary rendition, and it admits no tolerance for abuse during detention or interrogation.
In short, the Statement's a document essential to thorough consideration of what to do to undo post-9/11 detention policies.

Go On! "Transcending the Boundaries of Law"

(Go on! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Next week, from Thursday to Saturday, the Feminism and Legal Theory Project (FLTP), now hosted at Emory Law School, will celebrate 25 years of cutting edge scholarship in feminist legal theory with a major conference entitled Transcending the Boundaries of Law. The conference will feature papers from some of the most prominent legal academics working in feminist legal theory across various different areas of law and society. The incredibly impressive programme is available here, and, inter alia, features papers from a number of people working in international law (including myself, Laura Spitz, Fionnuala ní Aoláin and Siobhán Mullally).
The FLTP was founded by Professor Martha Fineman (below right) while she was in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and it travelled with her as she progressed through her career at Columbia, Cornell (where she held the first endowed chair in feminist jurisprudence in the United States), and most recently, Emory. (photo credit) In a recent interview with our colleagues at Feminist Law Professors, available here, Martha explained her motivation for establishing the FLTP thus:

My tenure decision at the University of Wisconsin was delayed a year when one of the [liberal] senior professors pulled his letter of support from my file because I published an article arguing that formal equality was not the model to use for family law reform. He was outraged that I rejected liberal precepts. He later changed his mind and apologized. Another colleague condescendingly told me that even if I questioned formal equality he knew I didn’t want any “special treatment” simply because I was the single mother of four children. I told him I didn’t want special treatment, but perhaps deserved some recognition that I had managed to meet all the tenure requirements while balancing family circumstances that probably would have defeated many others on the faculty (I meant him, with his stay-at-home wife who not only raised the children, but also edited his papers). Those and other encounters taught me there was a real need for a supportive environment to encourage feminist work, particularly of the kind that challenged traditional assumptions and received wisdom, and was based on women’s lived experiences.

For many of us--myself included--the Project and Martha have offered (and, indeed, continue to provide) a supportive and warm environment in which rigorous debate, scholarship and lots of writing have taken place. All the indications are that next week’s conference will carry on in precisely that refreshing, challenging and creative vein.

Go On! "Reforming Laws on Sexual Violence"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest.) In October 2000 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, however the questions surrounding sexual violence and how the law ought to respond in order to both prevent and punish sexual violence continues to be contentious in both the international and domestic legal systems.

On 27 June 2008 the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, University College Cork (Ireland) will hold a conference entitled "Reforming Laws on Sexual Violence: International Perspectives," at which international and domestic experts will consider questions and issues relating to legal responses to sexual violence. The papers presented will consider the treatment of sexual violence in ad hoc tribunals, sexual violence and peacekeeping, transitional justice and responses to sexual violence, and the reform of the Irish criminal legal system in this relation.

This one-day conference is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and forms part of Ireland’s chair of the Human Security Network. Full conference details, including booking form, are available here. Conference speakers include:

► Judge Teresa Doherty (Special Court for Sierra Leone)
► Kelly D. Askin (Open Society Initiative, and an IntLawGrrl)
► Prof. Doris Buss, Carleton University, Canada
► Amira Khair Khair, ICC Women/Sudan
► Madeleine Rees, Head of Women’s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
► Col. Ben Klappe, Military Judge/Judge in the District Court Arnheim/Netherlands Defence Academy
► Lt. Col. Oliver Barbour, Irish Defence Forces (GBV Consortium)
► Prof. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, University of Minnesota/Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster
► Prof. Penny Andrews, Valparaiso University (USA)/La Trobe University (Australia)
► Dr. Milena Pires, Timor-Leste

► James Hamilton, Director of Public Prosecutions
► Dr. Tom O’Malley BL, National University of Ireland, Galway
► Pauline Walley, Senior Counsel

Details on registration here.