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Image courtesy of Adriana Corral




The conference will consider questions such as the following:  What are the political or other sources of the human rights movement’s focus on criminal prosecution?  How has the presence of international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court affected human rights activism, both locally and globally?  How has the arguably emerging norm of international law against (formal) amnesty for those who have committed gross human rights violations affected the ways in which countries are permitted to “transition” after conflict?  How has the debate from the 1990s about whether peace or justice should take priority in transition been reconfigured through the emergence of anti-impunity as an overriding norm? What roles do and should historical archives play in legal and political processes?  What is the relationship between criminal and civil liability for human rights violations and between international criminal law, international humanitarian law, international human rights and transitional justice?  Do they function in similar or different ways via a norm of anti-impunity?

The conference is co-sponsored by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Department of Government, the Humanities Institute, the Barron Ulmer Kidd Centennial Lectureship, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the South Asia Institute, all at the University of Texas of Austin, and by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.