Event

After Atrocity: Optimizing UN Action toward Accountability for Human Rights Abuses

Wednesday, September 17, 2014 17:30to19:00
Chancellor Day Hall Maxwell Cohen Moot Court (NCDH 100), 3644 rue Peel, Montreal, QC, H3A 1W9, CA

Join us for the 2014 John P. Humphrey Lecture in Human Rights, which, this year, will be given by Steven Ratner, Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

Abstract

The UN's engagement with holding individuals accountable for human rights atrocities is barely twenty years old.  Although much attention has been given to the UN's creation of international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and other places, accountability is a far more complex process of which criminal justice is only one part.  In considering its involvement in a post-tribunal era, the UN needs to focus its efforts on those processes where it has a comparative advantage to offer governments dealing with past atrocities as well as survivors.  The UN's role in fact-finding and investigation is a particularly promising avenue for the organization to pursue.   In developing a strategy for the future, it is important to ask whether and why the UN should be involved in accountability, what conditions are necessary for successful UN involvement, and how the UN can avoid certain pitfalls along the way.

Biography

Steven Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.  His research has focused on a range of contemporary challenges facing governments and international institutions, including ethnic conflict, territorial borders, implementation of peace agreements, regulation of foreign investment, the normative orders concerning armed conflict, and accountability for human rights violations.  He served as a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Group of Experts on Cambodia in 1998-99 and of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka in 2010-11.  He has also worked as an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State, a legal consultant at the office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities in The Hague, and a consultant on international law at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.  Since 2009, he has been a member of the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law.  Among his publications are The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict After the Cold War (St. Martin's, 1995); Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (Oxford, 1997, 2001 and 2009); International Law: Norms, Actors, Process (Aspen, 2002, 2006, and 2010), and The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations (Oxford, forthcoming 2014).  He is graduate of Princeton University, the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales (Geneva), and Yale Law School.

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