Sir Geoffrey Nice

Sir Geoffrey Nice

Sir Geoffrey Nice QC has practised as a barrister since 1971.  He worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – the ICTY – between 1998 and 2006 and led the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia.   Much of his work since has been connected to cases before the permanent International Criminal Court – Sudan, Kenya, Libya – or  pro bono for victims groups – Iran, Burma, North Korea – whose cases cannot get to any international court.  He works for several related NGO’s and lectures and commentates in the media in various countries on international war crimes issues.  He has been a part-time judge since 1984 sitting at the Old Bailey and has sat as judge in other jurisdictions, tribunals and inquiries.  Between 2009 and 2012 he was Vice-Chair of the Bar Standards Board, the body that regulates barristers. He is Gresham Professor of Law 2012-2013.

helen-jarvis

Helen Jarvis

Since the mid-1990s, Helen has worked on issues relating to crimes against humanity and genocide, mainly focusing on Cambodia, with Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program; the Cambodian Government Task Force for the Khmer Rouge Trials; and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as Chief of Public Affairs and then Chief of the Victims’ Support Section before retiring in 2010.

Helen is a Vice-President of the Permanent People’s Tribunal and a member of the International Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program and of the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Her recent publications include Getting away with genocide? Elusive justice and the Khmer . Rouge Trials (co-author with Tom Fawthrop); the Cambodia section of ABC-Clio’s. Modern Genocides online database; the Cambodia volume in ABC-Clio’s World Bibliographical. Series; “Mapping Cambodia’s “killing fields”, Chapter 14 of Materiel Culture : the archaeology of 20th century conflict; “Justice for the deceased”: victims’ participation in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 8:2 (2014); and “Powerful remains: the continuing presence of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in today’s Cambodia”, Human Remains and Violence, 1:2 (2015). She holds both Australian and Cambodian nationality and is currently living in Phnom Penh.

 

Mireille Fanon MendesMireille Fanon Mendes France

Currently, she is UN expert, chair of the Working Group for people of African descent.  President of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Has worked as legal adviser at the French National Assembly. Former professor of general didactics and literature

Has worked at the UNESCO Press

As judge, she has participated in many people’s tribunals of the Permanent People’s Tribunal based in Rome, Italy.

 

John GittingsJohn Gittings

is a writer and journalist who has specialised in modern Chinese and Asian history and in peace studies. He worked for many years for The Guardian (London) as East Asia Editor and Foreign Leader-writer, and covered major events in China for them from the 1970s onwards. More recently, he helped to edit the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace (2010) and has published a study of peace thinking from ancient times till today (The Glorious Art of Peace, OUP, 2012). He carried out research for The Guardian into the events of 1965-66 in Indonesia, on the 25th anniversary in 1990, and he reported from Jakarta during the East Timor crisis in 1999.

He was educated at Midhurst Grammar School and at Oxford University where he gained a first-class degree in 1961 in Oriental Studies. He wrote his first book on China at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (The Role of the Chinese Army, OUP, 1966). He later worked in Chile and Hong Kong, and taught Chinese politics at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster). In 1984 he published, with Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Steele, a study of the politics of the cold war (Superpowers in Collision, Penguin Books).

John Gittings now lives near Oxford where he moved to with his late wife Aelfthryth after leaving The Guardian in 2003. Together they brought up four sons. He is a Research Associate of the China Institute at London University (SOAS) and continues to lecture and write mainly on peace philosophy and history, recently focusing on aspects of the first world war.

His writings include “The Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966: Image and Reality“, in Mark Levene & Penny Roberts, ed., The Massacre in History (New York: Berghahn, 1999). His website is www.johngittings.com and he has a peace studies page at https://www.facebook.com/gittingsPeace.

 

shadisadrShadi Sadr

is the founder and director of Raahi, a legal centre for women. Raahi was closed down by the Iranian authorities in 2007 in a wave of repression against civil society. Ms. Sadr has touched the lives of hundreds of individuals through her work and her support for campaigns such as the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign. She has received several award such as Human Rights Tulip and Alexander Prize of Law School of Santa Clara University.

In 2010 Shadi Sadr established a new organisation Justice for Iran (JFI) which aims to address and eradicate the practice of impunity that empowers officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran to perpetrate widespread human right violations against their citizens, and to hold them accountable for their actions. As the Executive Director of Justice for Iran (JFI), she has overseen the creation and implementation of several research projects on gross violations of the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTs, women, and those who are persecuted because of their political beliefs. She is the co-author of Crime and Impunity: Sexual Torture of Women in Islamic Republic Prisons.

 

Cees Flinterman

is honorary professor of human rights at Utrecht University and Maastricht University since November 2007. Before that he was inter alia professor of human rights and director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Utrecht University, and Director of the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research (1998-2007), professor of constitutional and International law at Maastricht University (1982-1998) and Dean of the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (1984-1986).earlier he worked at Leiden University, the University of Ghana, the Ghana Law Reform Commission and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.From 2011-2014 Cees Flinterman was a member (and rapporteur) of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (2011-2014). Before that he was inter alia an alternate member of the UN Sub-Commission for the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities from 1986-1991. He was the chair of the Netherlands delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights from 1993-1994 and Vice-Chairperson of the 49th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (1993). From 1996 – 1999 he was a member of the Netherlands delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. He served as a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) from 2003 – 2010. He has also been a member of the board of a number of national and inter non-governmental organizations, such the International Service for Human Rights, the Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions the People’s Decade for Human Rights Education, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee, and the Netherlands section of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM).

He is presently the chair of the foundation Human Rights in the Picture.

His research interests relate to the United Nations system of human rights, human rights and foreign policy, public international law and (comparative) constitutional law, gender and human rights. His publications include: Flinterman, C. (associate ed.) & H.B. Schoepp-Schilling (ed.) The Circle of Empowerment. Twenty-five years of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The Feminist Press (2007); Flinterman, C. & Van Genugten, W.J.M., eds., Niet-Statelijke Actoren en de Rechten van de Mens: Gevestigde Waarden, Nieuwe Wegen, (2003); Flinterman, C. & Baehr, P. and Senders, M. Innovation and Inspiration: Fifty Years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (1999).

 

Judge Zak YacoobZak Yacoob

Retired Justice Zak Yacoob has been blind from infancy and studied at the Arthur Blaxall  school for Blind in Durban, South Africa.

He completed a law degree at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. While at University, and during practice, as an advocate from 1991 to 1998 Yacoob was a member of the underground of the African National congress and community organizations involved  in anti-apartheid and community activities including the United Democratic Front.

Zak ran a significant and diverse commercial and general legal practice being also engaged in community activities, defense of political prisoners charged for defying unjust apartheid laws, and challenging, on behalf of victims, detentions without trial, house arrest and other restrictive decrees.

In service as judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1998 to 2013, Yacoob become known nationally and internationally for his contribution to the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of South Africa.

Judge Yacoob was member of:

  • the committee that prepared the Bill of Rights in the 1993 Interim Constitution;
  • the Independent Electoral Commission, that was responsible for S. Africa first democratic election in 1994:
  • the Independent Panel of Experts that advised the Constitutional Assembly in preparing the 1996 final Constitution.

Zak also:

  • advised local-government bodies, the National Land Committee and the Department of Finance on giving effect to and compliance with the final constitution;
  • attended international conferences and workshops largely on human and socio- economic rights and on constitutionalism, human rights, disability and blindness;
  • received the 2013 Felicia and Sydney Kentridge Award for Service to the Law in Southern Africa
  • was awarded two honorary doctorates in law;
  • was a chancellor of the University of Durban -Westville;
  • taught  and teaches constitutional law at universities and Law Schools in America, India and S. Africa
  • continues to engage in voluntary activities both in and out of South Africa in the fields of judicial and legal education, socio-economic rights, disability rights and HIV and AIDS.

He has a particular interest in service delivery for the development and empowerment of blind and partially sighted, as well as deaf and hard of hearing persons. Yacoob has participated as one of the judges in the commission of enquiry held in London in March 2014 concerning the propriety of the conviction of the Cuban Five by the United States of America.