Guest Blogger: Carmen Márquez Carrasco

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Carmen Márquez Carrasco (left) as today's guest blogger.
The Professor holding the Chair in International Law and International Relations at Spain's University of Seville, Carmen is the Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the European Master's Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights in Venice, Italy. Having directed the program in 2005-2006, in 2007 she became the 1st woman elected as Chairperson, the position that had been held by Dr. Manfred Nowak, currently the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture. Centre projects that Carmen has spearheaded include a photo competition, "visualising democracy," and an international conference on human rights diplomacy.
Carmen earned her Ph.D. in law from the University of Seville, and she also holds diplomas from the Research Centre of the Hague Academy of International Law and the Erik Castrén Institute on Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
She received the Award Rafel Martínez Emperador, Consejo General del Poder Judicial (Madrid), for her contribution to a book entitled La criminalización de la barbarie (2000). Her publications concentrate on human rights, peace and security, and the codification and development of international law and international criminal law. In her guest post below, Carmen analyzes proposed legislation that would cut back on Spain's universal jurisdiction law.
For reasons she explains in a 2d post below, Carmen dedicates her work to the Spanish essayist and philosopher María Zambrano Alarcón. Zambrano joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in our list just below the "visiting from ..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

Dedicated to María Zambrano

I wish to dedicate my guest contribution to IntLawGrrls, posted above, to María Zambrano Alarcón (left), a Spanish essayist and phenomenological philosopher.

Despite the rarity of Spanish women essayists and philosophers, she chose as her vehicle the philosophical essay. She left more than one hundred articles and twenty-eight books, particularly impressive considering the gender and culture barriers that she faced in pre-Civil War Spain and postwar exile in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, and France. Exile and her affiliation with Spain's anti-Franco Republicans, combined with her essentially esoteric work, long kept Zambrano relatively unknown. When she finally returned to Spain in 1984, she received great honors and recognitions. However, they seemed to be more related to her Republican affiliation than with the originality and quality of her work.

Born on April 22, 1904, in Vélez-Málaga, Zambrano had a long academic career, and was affiliated with major universities in South and Central America and Europe, before her death in Madrid on February 6, 1991. Her work is characterised by the theoretical exploration of poetry's relation with epistemological epiphanies. She rejected philosophical rationalism and scientific reason and upheld the notion of “being-in-the world,” “dwelling,” letting things speak. She called that “the poetic reason.”