After Atrocity: Optimizing UN Action toward Accountability for Human Rights Abuses
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. 聽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. 聽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. 聽The UN's role in fact-finding and investigation is a particularly promising avenue for聽the organization to pursue. 聽 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. 聽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. 聽He served as a member of the UN Secretary-General鈥檚 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.聽 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聽consultant on international law at the International聽Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. 聽Since 2009, he has been a member of the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law.聽 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). 聽He is graduate of Princeton University,聽the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales (Geneva), and聽Yale Law School.