Join MESF for an afternoon seminar with Dr Michelle Burgis-Kasthala (Australian National University and University of Edinburgh) for a discussion on Accountability for Syria? The Role of International Criminal Justice During and After the Conflict on Friday June 1 at Deakin University’s Burwood campus. 

Abstract:

The scale of suffering and the instability generated by the Syrian conflict marks it out as perhaps the greatest challenge to regional order this century. This century also began with the emergence of the International Criminal Court (ICC) following a wave of specially created tribunals for atrocity crimes. Yet the failure of the ICC to constrain actors in the Syrian conflict potentially undermines not only the Court’s legitimacy but the project of international criminal justice as a whole. To counter this, a variety of initiatives led both by NGOs as well as the UN have attempted to fill the gap left by the ICC. In this seminar, I will survey the field of international criminal accountability responses relating to Syria, before focussing in particular on the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a private, non-profit NGO.

Bio:

Dr. Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is a Research Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and member of the Centre for International Governance and Justice (CIGJ) at the Australian National University. Before joining RegNet she spent six years in Scotland as a lecturer in International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of St Andrews and then as a lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests lie in the fields of critical international legal studies with a regional focus on the Arab world where she has lived and worked. Her doctoral thesis and then book (Brill, 2009) was entitled Boundaries of Discourse in the International Court of Justice: Mapping Arguments in Arab Territorial Disputes. Her ARC DECRA project interrogated the interrelationship between international criminal law, human rights law and transitional justice as registers of redress within the revolutionary context of the Arab Uprisings. She is also a Research School of Asia and the Pacific (RSAP) Fellow.

Event details:

Friday 1 June 2018

2:00 – 3:30pm

Level 2, Building BC

Deakin University Burwood campus

RSVP to mesf@deakin.edu.au by May 31.

Download the flyer here.

Watch the video recording of the event here.