Briggs and Morgan, Professional Association and

Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights present

Women’s Human Rights Speaker Series

Women, Truth and Transition

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law, University of Minnesota Law School

Director and Professor of Law, Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster

Tuesday, December 11^th, 2007, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Briggs and Morgan, Minnesota Room

2200 IDS Center, 80 S. 8^th St., Minneapolis

Application will be made for one CLE credit.

Transitional justice has been of substantial interest to both domestic and international lawyers for many years.  Lawyers have had a healthy pre-occupation with “Dealing with the Past”, namely the morality and law of holding human rights abusers accountable at the point of societal change.  In this context academic lawyers have been mostly concerned with and written about trials, courts, truth commissions, amnesties, and punishment forms.  Gender has not been a significant concern for transitional justice even though all of these specialised accountability mechanisms have clear and often profound implications for women.  A fundamental premise of this talk is that the justice in transition is highly gendered.  The analysis will focus particularly on what kinds of “wrongs” are accounted for, and which are not, and the relationship between a gendered truth and a politics of transformation for both men and women in new political dispensations.  The presentation is concerned with the manner in which the gender narrative is often missing from or compromised in the transitional justice fora.  It will explore the reasons for and forms of these silences, exclusions and compromised presences.

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is the Dorsey and Whitney Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Professor of Law at the University of Ulster’s Transitional Justice Institute in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  She is co-founder and present Director of the Institute.  Professor Ní Aoláin received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law at the Queen’s University Law Faculty in Belfast, Northern Ireland and an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School.  Professor Ní Aoláin is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann Scholarship, a European Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship.  She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, and sex based violence in times of war.  She was a representative of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996-97).  In 2003, she was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making.  In 2004, she was nominated by the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights, the first woman and the first academic lawyer to be thus nominated, and is also a current nominee to the Court.  She was appointed by the Irish Minister of Justice to the Irish Commission for Human Rights in 2000, and was a member of the Joint Committee of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Irish Commission for Human Rights created by the Good Friday peace agreement. 

Free and open to the public (registration required).  Please RSVP to Tina at shouareau@briggs.com or 612-977-8126 by Friday, December 7^th.  Lunch will be provided for those who RSVP. 

This is one in a series of lunchtime speakers dedicated to improving awareness of women’s human rights issues.  Please join us the second Tuesday of alternating months for additional presentations.  For more information, contact Mary Hunt at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, mhunt@mnadvocates.org or 612-341-3302, ext. 107, or see our website at www.mnadvocates.org.