Centre for Historical Studies
School of Social Sciences
Special Lecture
Globalisation's Re-write of the Narrative of International Criminal Justice
Rosemary Byrne
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Room No: 326, Committee Room, Chs, SSS-III
5th September 2017, 11am (Tuesday)
Abstract : In the 1990s the human rights lawyers’ narrative of international criminal justice promised more than individual accountability for atrocities; at its most utopian, it offered nothing short of a new hope for humanity and a transformation of violent conflict. The disconnect between the profession’s legally imagined world order and the global and grassroots experience of those for whom justice was to be delivered has triggered a reluctant revisionist history in the field. This work moves beyond law’s narrow paradigm, exploring the core challenges to international criminal trials that are embedded in the dynamics of globalization.
About the Speaker: Professor Rosemary Byrne teaches International and Human Rights Law at the Law School, Trinity College Dublin. She is a former Human Rights Commissioner for the Irish Human Rights Commission, which is the national human rights institution established in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. She recently finished her term as Chair of the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, where which she continues to serve as a member until 2018. Since 2011 she has been a Visiting Professor of International Law at the Paris School of International Affairs, Institut d'Études Politiques (Sciences-Po) and has also been a member of the visiting faculty at the China-EU School of Law, China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing.