Expert Roundtable:

Women’s Inclusion in Transitional Justice Processes

Event Description

PILPG hosted a conversation with experts regarding increasing women’s inclusion in transitional justice processes on June 10 from 12 pm to 1 pm EDT.

Women’s involvement in rebuilding and repairing the consequences of conflict is paramount for a just transition, as they are often the ones who bear the biggest brunt of conflict. The lack of attention and impunity for sexual and gender-based crimes are fundamental obstacles to sustainable transitional justice efforts. As such, the insufficient role of women in transitional justice is a topic that requires urgent attention from practitioners and academics in the field of international relations and international law.

During this event our panelists discussed the challenges women face during and after conflict and the role they play in truth, reconciliation, healing, justice, and political transformation, gaps in transitional justice processes around the globe, effective engagement of women’s perspectives in transitional justice processes, and protection of women’s rights in transitional justice. This event was moderated by PILPG Managing Director Professor Milena Sterio.

This event is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.

Event Recording

Speakers

**Jackline Nasiwa**
Jackline Nasiwa is a Senior Peace Fellow with PILPG. Ms. Nasiwa is an experienced lawyer and rule of law specialist based in Juba, South Sudan. She currently serves as the National Director for the Centre for Inclusive Governance, Peace and Justice. As part of PILPG’s work in South Sudan through the SUCCESS Consortium, Ms. Nasiwa provided technical assistance to South Sudanese civil society actors to more effectively engage in both formal and informal peace processes, including matters of transitional justice, traditional justice, constitutional development, and civic education. She also supported women's participation in political processes including the peace process and constitutional development. Prior to joining PILPG, Ms. Nasiwa worked with the National Democratic Institute as the Senior Manager on Constitutional Development. She also has previous experience with the South Sudan Referendum Bureau, the International Development Law Organization, and the United Nations Development Program.
Ms. Nasiwa is member of the Technical Committee appointed by the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs to facilitate public consultations in the process to develop legislation for the constitution of the Commission of Truth Healing and Reconciliation. Together with other CSOs, Ms. Nasiwa shall provide technical support to the committee given her expertise in public consultation, civic education material development and dialogues on transitional justice issues. Jackline is the Chairperson of the National Alliance of Women Lawyers of South Sudan and has a long history of facilitating TOTs to CSO, academia and women groups on understanding transitional justice and human rights. Ms. Nasiwa is winner of the Every Girl Win in 2021 and was awarded the South Sudanese Women Achievers for Peace for Human Rights Defender in 2021 by the South Sudanese Women Intellectuals Forum.

**Dr. Priya Pillai**
Dr. Priya Pillai is a lawyer and international law specialist, with two decades of expertise in the areas of international justice, international human rights, transitional justice, peace and conflict, and humanitarian issues.
She has worked at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) headquarters in Geneva on legal issues in the humanitarian sphere, at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on trials in the aftermath of the Balkans conflict, and with various civil society organizations on implementation of international law (human rights, rule of law and transitional justice). Dr. Pillai has been involved in different aspects of peace and transitional justice initiatives, in South and South-East Asia, and she writes and advocates on these issues regularly. Dr. Pillai consults on various aspects of international law, for organizations such as Amnesty International, WHO and the IFRC.
She holds a PhD in international law and transitional justice from the Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies, Geneva. Her doctoral dissertation, on the feasibility of truth commissions in India, covers an assessment of prosecutions and amnesties in international law, powers of truth commissions, the ‘right to truth’ in international and domestic law, international and domestic commissions of inquiry, and peoples’ tribunals.
Dr. Pillai obtained an LL.M from New York University and a law degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

**Professor Valerie Oosterveld**
Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at Western University's Faculty of Law in Canada. Her research and writing focus on gender issues within international criminal justice. She has published widely on the subject of the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Professor Oosterveld is a member of the Canadian Partnership for International Justice, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is the Associate Director of Western University’s Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction. She served as an Associate Dean at the Faculty of Law from 2014-2018.
Before joining the Faculty of Law in 2005, Valerie served in the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In this role, she provided legal advice on international criminal accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, especially with respect to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She served on the Canadian delegation to various ICC-related negotiations, including the Assembly of States Parties. In 1998, she was a member of the Canadian delegation to UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an ICC. In this role, she negotiated various gender provisions, as Canada played a leading role in pressing for a gender-sensitive Rome Statute. In 2010, she served on the Canadian delegation to the Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda.

**Patricia V. Sellers**
Ms Patricia V. Sellers, an international criminal lawyer, is a Special Adviser on Slavery Crimes at the International Criminal Court and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she teaches international criminal law and human rights law. She is a
Practicing Professor at London School of Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center of the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Special Advisor on Gender to the former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Mrs Fatou Bensouda, from2016-2021. She was the Legal Advisor for Gender, Acting Head of the Legal Advisory Section and a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1994-2007 and the Legal Advisor for Gender at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) from 1995-1999. Ms Sellers was a prosecutor on the trial teams of Akayesu, Furundzija, Kunarac, Nikolic and Oric. She has developed legal strategies that led to landmark decisions regarding sexual violence as constitutive conduct of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture and enslavement under international criminal law.Ms Sellers has advised governments and civil society entities and lectured extensively on international criminal law. She has authored numerous articles, including, Missing in Action: The International Crime of the Slave Trade, Wartime Female Slavery: Enslavement?, and, forthcoming, The International Crimes of Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Feminist Critique. She has testified as an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the cases of J. v. Peru, Favela Nova Brasilia v. Brazil, Albarracín v. Ecuador and Lima and Others v. Colombia. Ms Sellers is the recipient of the prestigious Prominent Women in International Law Award by the American Society of International Law.She holds an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the City University of New York, as well as an Honorary Fellow for Lifetime Achievement from the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania, her alma mater.

**Dr. Kateryna Busol**
Dr. Kateryna Busol is a Ukrainian lawyer specializing in international humanitarian, criminal law, transitional justice, gender and cultural heritage. She is a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine; a fellow of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany; and an Academy Associate at Chatham House, the UK.Kateryna has worked on different issues of accountability and transitional justice related to the Russia-Ukraine armed conflict with UN Women, Global Survivors Fund, Global Rights Compliance as well as Ukrainian NGOs such as the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, Media Initiative for Human Rights and Truth Hounds. She has also been a Visiting Professional at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Kateryna is the founder of the #InternationalLawTalks and a Board member of the Cambridge Society of Ukraine, which enhances educational opportunities for Ukrainian children.

**Pinky Mehta**
Pinky Mehta is a senior associate in the Washington, DC office of Milbank and a member of the firm’s Global Risk & National Security Practice. Ms. Mehta focuses her practice on international and cross-border regulatory matters, including promoting compliance with anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, and economic sanctions laws, as well as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. Ms. Mehta also maintains a pro bono practice involving human rights, corporate responsibility, and sustainable development matters.

She supports PILPG’s work in South Sudan and is helping to author a handbook on women’s inclusion in transitional justice.

Ms. Mehta was previously a fellow at the United Nations Development Programme. There she worked on rule of law, access to justice, and human rights matters, and she supported judiciaries globally on measuring and reporting progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to the representation and inclusion of women in the judiciary.

She received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she earned the Noyes E. Leech Award for achievement in international law and graduated with a Certificate in Business Economics and Public Policy from the Wharton School of Business. Ms. Mehta received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, with a minor in Economics, from Haverford College.

MODERATOR

Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Managing Director at PILPG is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.