Rights Research Series
The Sussex Centre for Human Rights Research Seminar Series includes a range of events, including external speakers, work in progress seminars, brainstorming sessions, and doctoral debates.
In-person events are subject to us being able to book a room (rooms haven’t been released yet). Everyone is welcome - in whatever format is most convenient for you.
Spring 2023 Rights Research Series
- Wednesday 08 February 2023, Book Launch Dr Benjamin Thorne ( University of Kent) The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals: Memory, Atrocity and Transitional Justice (Routledge London, 2022)
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Book Launch Dr Benjamin Thorne (University of Kent) The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals: Memory, Atrocity and Transitional Justice (Routledge London, 2022)
Date: Wednesday 8th February 2023
Time: 4-6pm
Venue: Freeman and online via Zoom
Speakers: Dr Nicola Palmer (Reader in Criminal Law, Kings College London) as external discussant and Dr Josh Bowsher (Lecturer in Sociology, University of Sussex) as internal discussant.
Abstract of the book:
This book analyses how international criminal institutions, and their actors – legal counsels, judges, investigators, registrars – construct witness identity and memory.
Filling an important gap within transitional justice scholarship, this conceptually led and empirically grounded interdisciplinary study takes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as a case study. It asks: How do legal witnesses of human rights violations contribute to memory production in transitional post-conflict societies? Witnessing at tribunals entails individuals externalising memories of violations. This is commonly construed within the transitional justice legal scholarship as an opportunity for individuals to ensure their memories are entered into an historical record. Yet this predominant understanding of witness testimony fails to comprehend the nature of memory. Memory construction entails fragments of individual and collective memories within a contestable and contingent framing of the past. Accordingly, the book challenges the claim that international criminal courts and tribunals are able to produce a collective memory of atrocities; as it maintains that witnessing must be understood as a contingent and multi-layered discursive process.
Contributing to the specific analysis of witnessing and memory, but also to the broader field of transitional justice, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in these areas, as well as others in legal theory, global criminology, memory studies, international relations, and international human rights.
- Friday 24 Feb 2023, SCHRR Work in Progress Seminar, on Ceylan Begum Tildiz, 'The Murderer State will be Held to Account: The myth of the state and its violence'
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Title: SCHRR Work in Progress seminar, on Ceylan Begüm Yıldız, 'The Murderer State will be Held to Account: The myth of the state and its violence'.
Date: Friday 24 Feb 2023
Time: 2-3pm
- Wednesday 08 March 2023, Dr Elizabeth Craig, 'Re)appraising he Council of Europe's Approach to Minority Rights in the Context of War in Ukraine'
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Dr Elizabeth Craig, ‘Re)appraising the Council of Europe’s Approach to Minority Rights in the Context of War in Ukraine’
Date: Wednesday 08 March 2023
Time: 4-5pm,
Over a year has passed since the 2022 Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and over eight years since the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea and the taking of control by Russian separatist groups of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbas. Unlike earlier wars in Europe, such as those in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s, the decades leading up to the war also witnessed the adoption and subsequent consolidation of European minority rights standards. These standards focused on the protection of national minorities rather than their empowerment, and the story of monitoring and the development of a ‘constructive dialogue’ is ultimately one of failure when seen in the context of the protection of minority and indigenous rights in Ukraine and prevention of violations based on membership of a minority or indigenous groups. This paper aims to explore what went wrong not by focusing on the State or even minorities themselves as the key actors, but rather by focusing on the role of the bodies responsible for monitoring implementation of these new standards. Whilst Ukraine’s initial minority rights trajectory was a fairly standard one for a newly independent States in transition, the last decade has witnessed the almost tangible fear of the monitoring bodies to present a robust challenge to Ukraine on minority rights given the ever-increasing threat and looming presence of the aggressor State.
Venue: Freeman G22 and online
Followed by a Research Café 5-5:30pm – please join us to have a chat with each other about current and future research projects, over a hot drink and biscuits!
- Tuesday 14 March 2023, Dr Qingxiu Bu, Automated Facial Recognition (AFR) and Human Rights/Privacy Implications
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Title: Dr Qingxiu Bu, Automated Facial Recognition (AFR) and Human Rights/Privacy Implications
Date: Tuesday 14 March 2023
Time: 3-4pm
Venue: Freeman F39 and online book via Eventbrite here - Thursday 23 March 2023, PhD work in Progress
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PhD work in Progress. Matilde Rocca (PhD researcher University of Padova, visiting PhD student at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Sussex alumni): 'Assessing the legality of State interference with private rescue operations at sea'
Sophia Taha (PhD researcher Keele University), 'Postcolonial Resistance to U.K. Bureaucracy: Centring Migrant Women as they navigate ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’'
Date: 23 March 2023
Time: 2-3:30pm
Venue: Freeman Moot Room and online book via Eventbrite here
We hope to see you there!
- Thursday 11 May 2023, Minority Rights Solidary Network in conjunction with SCHRR workshop 'What Next? 30 Year After the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities'
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Title: Minority Rights Solidary Network in conjunction with SCHRR workshop 'What Next? 30 Years After the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities'
Date: Thursday 11th May 2023
Time:
Venue: Freeman G22 and online
Autumn 2022 Rights Research Series
- Friday 09 September 2022, MinorityRights@Sussex Scoping Workshop
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Title: MinorityRights@Sussex Scoping Workshop
Date: Friday 09 Septmebr 2022
Time: 10:30am -4pm
Joining Instructions: Invitation only event
This scoping workshop will bring together academics working in the field to discuss the added value and significance of minority rights in the 21st century, with the aim of fostering connections, finding common ground/synergies and exploring the potential for future collaborations.
- Wednesday 26 October 2022, WIP Session - 'Seeking Agency in Transitional Justice: The Case of the Saturday Mothers in Turkey'
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WIP Session
Rights Research Series 2022/23
Date: Wednesday 26th October 2022
Time: 12.00-1.30pm
Venue: Freeman G16
‘Seeking Agency in Transitional Justice: The Case of the Saturday Mothers in Turkey’
Güneş Daşli
PhD Researcher, Jena Centre for Reconciliation Studies, Friedrich Schiller Universtät, Germany.
- Wednesday 26 October 2022 - Research Cafe
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New - Research Café
Date: Wednesday 26th October 2022
Time: 1.30-2pm
Venue: Freeman G16 (after Güneş Daşli’s WIP session)
- Wednesday 16 Nov 2022 - 2022/23 Annual General Meeting and Research Cafe
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2022/23 Annual General Meeting and Research Café
Date: Wednesday 16th November 2022
Time: 12-2pm
Venue: Freeman G16
- Wednesday 23 Nov 2022 - WIP Session
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WIP Session
Rights Research Series 2022/23
Date: Wednesday 23 November 2022
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Ashdown House G5 and online
'Imagining the Possibilities: Reconceptualizing Reproductive Freedom'
Laurenne Abisioye Ajayi (PhD Researcher, Sussex Centre for Human Rights Research)
with Dr Mary Frances Lukera @SussexLaw as discussant
'Settler Colonialism, Drones and Law: The Case of Israel/Palestine'
Yaar Dagan (PhD Researcher, Keele School of Law, Keele university)
- Friday 2nd Dec 2022, Book Launch: 'Black Iconography and Colonial (Re)production at the International Criminal Court: Independence Char Cha' by Stanley Mwangi Wanjiru
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Book Launch: 'Black Iconography and Colonial (Re)production at the International Criminal Court: Independence Char Cha' by Dr Stanley Mwangi Wanjiru
Date: Friday 2nd December 2022
Time: 12-2pm
Venue: Freeman F22 and online
Speaker: Dr Sara Kendall (Reader in International Law, University of Kent)
About the book:
This book explores the reproduction of colonialism at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and examines international criminal law (ICL) vs the black body through an immersive format of art, music, poetry, and architecture and post-colonial/critical race theory lens.
Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book interrogates the operationalisation of the Rome Statute to detail a Eurocentric hegemony at the core of ICL. It explores how colonialism and slavery have come to shape ICL, exposing the perpetuation of the colonial, and warns that it has ominous contemporary and future implications for Africa. As currently envisaged and acted out at the ICC, this law is founded on deceptive and colonial ideas of ‘what is wrong’ in/with the world. The book finds that the contemporary ICL regime is founded on white supremacy that corrupts the law’s interaction with the African. The African is but a unit utilised by the global elite to exploit and extract resources. From time to time, these alliances disintegrate with ICL becoming a retaliatory tool of choice. What is at stake is power, not justice. This power has been hierarchical with Eurocentrism at the top throughout modern history. Colonialism is seen not to have ended but to have regerminated through the foundation of the ‘independent’ African state. The ICC reproduces the colonial by use of European law and, ultimately, the over-representation of the black accused. To conclude, the book provides a liberated African forum that can address conflicts in the content, with a call for the end of the ICC’s involvement in Africa. The demand is made for an African court that utilises non-colonising African norms which are uniquely suited to address local conflicts.
Multidisciplinary in nature, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international criminal law, criminal justice, human rights law, African studies, global social justice, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and philosophy.