This is a hybrid event. For attendance via Zoom, please register online.
Join us for an event in which Kieran McEvoy for an exploration of the intersection between law, politics and agency in seeking to encourage armed groups to take responsibility for past human rights violations. Drawing on almost three decades of experience in working with armed groups in Northern Ireland, as well as comparative fieldwork conducted in over a dozen conflicted, authoritarian or transitional societies, the talk examines how to get armed groups to engage with transitional justice processes such as truth recovery, reparations, apologies and acknowledgement for past harms. It will examine the limitations of legalistic engagement with armed groups and the controversial topic of amnesties or limited forms of immunity to encourage such processes. Kieran McEvoy will also propose a schema by which the legitimacy of reparative actions by armed groups such as truth recovery or apologies can be assessed.
Panelists
Kieran McEvoy is the Senator George J. Mitchell Chair in Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute and a Professor of Law and Transitional Justice at Queens University Belfast. He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2023-26) and was a Fulbright Distinguished Researcher and Fellow in the Harvard Human Rights Program 2001-2002. He is longstanding peace and human rights activist in Northern Ireland, and he has authored or co-authored four books, co-edited eight books or special issues and over seventy journal articles and scholarly book chapters. He has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy (2020) and the Royal Irish Academy (2019), the most prestigious indicators of scholarly esteem in the UK and Ireland respectively.
Anna Crowe (moderator) is a Senior Clinical Instructor and the Associate Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. She supervises students on projects focused on gender and armed conflict, the use of international trade restrictions on conventional arms and law enforcement equipment to prevent rights violations, and refugee rights, particularly rights to a legal identity and freedom of movement. She has developed and implemented projects with Amnesty International, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Control Arms, and Privacy International among others. Anna was a constitutional lawyer for the New Zealand government in the Crown Law Office and served at the New Zealand Supreme Court as a clerk to the Chief Justice.
This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative, Advocates for Human Rights, and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.