Category: Transitional Justice

Summer School Input

Today, 10 July 2020, the Hume O’Neill Chair, Professor Brandon Hamber, made an online input to the “Summer Institute in Northern Ireland: Lessons in Community Peacebuilding”. The Institute was moved online due to the Covid-19 context. The Institute is led by Professor Marie Breen-Smyth and is based at the University of Massachusetts (Boston) in partnership with a consortium of local residents and International Peace Education Resources (IPER). Professor Hamber’s input focused on the issue of Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland.

Briefing: Historical Institutional Abuse

Professor Patricia Lundy and Professor Brandon Hamber have now published a Policy Brief based on work on historical institutional abuse and transitional justice.

This policy briefing draws upon the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry to explicate the nexus of historical institutional abuse inquiries with transitional justice approaches. Through detailed analysis of empirical research with those who gave testimony to the Inquiry, the briefing explores to what extent the Inquiry was victim-centric, participatory and responsive. Drawing on lessons from transitional justice, the brief outlines five recommendations that could strengthen the victim-centred nature of approaches to dealing with the legacy of historical child abuse. The brief concludes that addressing victims’ needs should be the linchpin for both transitional justice and historical institutional abuse approaches.

To download the Policy Brief, click here.

To download the longer Research Article, click here.

Transformative Gender and the SHA

The fourth seminar in the Dealing with the Past series entitled “Dealing with the Past and the SHA: Is a transformative gender approach possible?” was hosted online on 24 June 2020, with some 60 people joining online.

In the seminar Claire Hackett, Healing Through Remembering & Falls Community Council and Dr Catherine O’Rourke, reflected on the exclusion of women and gender from dominant approaches to dealing with the past in the Stormont House Agreement (SHA). The seminar discussed a specific intervention to remedy these absences and silences, namely the development of Gender Principles for Dealing with the Legacy of the Past by a network of women drawn from academia, the human rights and victims sectors. The seminar further reflected on the opportunity to address gender more broadly in any process to deal with the past, in particular the inclusion of LGBTQ experiences and perspectives. The seminar reflected on some of the reasons why these perspectives have been so absent from the primary debate, and considered possible strategies and approaches for devising a more gender-inclusive process.

The seminar is part of the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) and INCORE, in partnership with Healing Through Remembering and the John Hume and Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace, online seminar series. The seminar was chaired by Professor Brandon Hamber. The seminar can now be watched online.

Seminar: Breaking Binary History

The first of the “Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland” seminar series is now available online. The seminar was entitled “Breaking Binary History: Can the Stormont House Agreement facilitate a broader and more representative understanding of the past?”” by Dr Adrian Grant on 7 May 2020.

The seminar is part of the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) and INCORE, in partnership with Healing Through Remembering and the John Hume and Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace, online seminar series. The seminar was chaired by Professor Brandon Hamber.

Dealing with Past: Online Seminars

Despite the challenging current context debates about how to address Northern Ireland’s past continue. The Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) and INCORE, in partnership with Healing Through Remembering and the John Hume and Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace, will be hosting an online seminar series to debate these important issues. This online seminar series will explore the Stormont House Agreement and dealing with the past in Northern Ireland and run for the remainder of the year.

Find out more and review the schedule of seminars.

Remembering without Revenge

On the 16 of April 2019 the Chair hosted Dr. Carl Stauffer. Stauffer teaches Restorative and Transitional Justice at the graduate Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA. He concurrently serves as Co-Director of CJP’s Zehr Institute of Restorative Justice and is the Academic Director of the Caux Scholars Program in Switzerland. A seminar was hosted by the Chair jointly by INCORE and TJI entitled “Memorialization: Remembering without Revenge”. In the seminar Dr Stauffer tackled the collective memory of historical harms. The point was made that it is no longer a question of if we will remember, it is instead a question of how we will remember past atrocities. Building on the work of Mirolsav Volf, the seminar wrestled with the question of whether it is possible to “remember rightly in a violent world?”

Dr. Carl Stauffer from the graduate Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA

Hague Policy Dialogue: “Making Transitional Justice Work”

I399dd96dfb45f0dfea4990cb335d3993mpunity Watch (IW), International Development Law Organization (IDLO), and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) organised an expert meeting entitled “Making Transitional Justice Work” from 25-27 November 2015 in The Hague. The meeting convened a highly qualified group of policy makers, practitioners and experts in the field of traditional justice to discuss and develop new ideas for effective and reinvigorated transitional justice policy in accordance with practical challenges. The meeting also focused on the practical guide on transitional justice to be used by the Dutch government and other policy-makers in the field. The Chair attended the meeting, participated and facilitated a session.