29-30 October 2010, Bucharest
Call for: papers
Deadline: 30/09/2010
The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, together with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and in collaboration with the Faculty of Political Science (University of Bucharest) will organize an international conference on the topic of Transitional Criminal Justice in Post-Dictatorial Societies.
Organisers invite scholars to reflect upon the manner in which criminal prosecutions came to be assessed as types of reaction against massive human rights violations, within the variety of transitions and transitional justice approaches. The genealogy of transitional justice indicates that in the last three decades, the number of trials against former leaders of non-democratic regimes increased, whereas amnesties and impunity have been systematically challenged by the necessity of prosecuting human rights abuses.
Papers may address topics such as:
* Legal and political constraints in convicting human rights abuses after dictatorships’ breakdown;
* Attempts at incorporating international justice mechanisms into state and national criminal prosecutions;
* The extent to which transitional criminal justice contributes to the consolidation of the Rule of Law and/or to reconciliation/social reconstruction efforts;
* The manner in which criminal prosecutions impact law reform in a broader sense;
* The way in which precedents of external intervention impact transitional justice initiatives;
* The relationship existing between culturally patterned practices and transitional criminal justice;
* The role of the state and of civil society actors in the evolution of transitional criminal justice;
Submission procedure
All interested participants should submit the paper abstracts (max. 200 words, in English) to Raluca Grosescu, Head of the Public Policies Department at: ralucagrosescu@yahoo.com
The submission deadline is 30th September 2010.
