Human Rights Documentation Solutions
International Criminal Court 19th Assembly of States Parties Side Event
Human Rights Documentation by Civil Society:
A Pathway Toward Accountability
On December 10, 2020, in the context of the International Criminal Court’s 19th Assembly of States Parties, PILPG held a side event on the subject of Human Rights Documentation for Accountability by Civil Society. Since 2018, PILPG has published two reports on documentation: Documenting Atrocity Crimes Committed Against The Rohingya in Myanmar's Rakhine State (2018); and Human Rights Documentation Solutions: Human Rights Documentation by Civil Society – Technological Needs, Challenges, and Workflows; Perspectives from Documenters, Transitional Justice Experts, and Tool Developers (2020).
For this discussion, PILPG’s panel of experts focused on the particular difficulties civil society documenters face when documenting atrocity crimes for the purposes of accountability and shared its experiences of documentation in Bangladesh/Myanmar. Our discussants have in-depth experience with these efforts and contributed to a robust conversation on documentation methodology, workflows, tool selection, evidentiary standards, general challenges for documenters in the field, and the need for greater dialogue between technological and transitional justice actors. At the center of our discussion, our panelists explained how such documentation efforts are a necessary pathway toward accountability.
Speakers
Professor Milena Sterio
Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Co-Coordinator for Global Criminal Justice Partnerships at the 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.
Professor Margaret deGuzman
Professor Margaret deGuzman is a James E. Beasley Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for International Law and Public Policy at Temple University. In her capacity as Senior Peace Fellow at PILPG, Professor deGuzman advised on the Sudanese peace process and is contributing to our Expert Exchange Transitional Justice interview series. Professor deGuzman's scholarship focuses on the role of international criminal law in the global legal order. Her recent work includes a book, Shocking the Conscience of Humanity: Gravity and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Law, with Oxford University Press, and a forthcoming co-edited volume on the International Criminal Court with Edward Elgar publishing. She is also co-authoring a book on the impact of the Extraordinary African Chambers in the Courts of Senegal on national, regional, and global justice norms. Previously, Professor deGuzman clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced law in San Francisco, specializing in criminal defense. Professor deGuzman also served as a legal advisor to the Senegal delegation at the Rome Conference and as a law clerk in the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Darou N’diar, Senegal. Professor deGuzman received a Ph.D. (human rights) from the National University of Ireland, Galway, a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
Adrienne Fricke
Adrienne Fricke is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and a consultant specializing in human rights and refugee-related issues in the Middle East and Africa. Her most recent publication with Physicians for Human Rights, released December 8, addresses the human rights issues of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the humanitarian crisis in southern Syria. Ms. Fricke has conducted field missions in Bangladesh, Chad, Colombia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Syria, Sudan, and Turkey. She was an investigator on the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Team (2004) and PILPG’s Bangladesh Investigation Mission (2018).
Bethany Houghton
Bethany Houghton is a lecturer and researcher at the Vrije (Free) Universiteit Amsterdam. She previously studied law at the University of Durham in the UK and pursued post-graduate law studies in Transnational Legal Studies and Legal Theory at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam, graduating cum laude. Bethany also serves as Assistant Counsel at the Public International Law & Policy Group where she works on human rights documentation solutions. For the Netherlands Office of PILPG, she is a project coordinator of the Virtual Human Rights Lawyer, a tool that uses technology to address the access to justice gap in relation to international human rights law.
Discussion moderator
Dr. Gregory P. Noone
Dr. Gregory P. Noone, Ph.D., J.D., is a Senior Peace Fellow and Senior Legal Advisor for PILPG. Dr. Noone currently leads the Yemen track- two diplomacy team and serves as the Senior Legal Advisor for the Human Rights Documentation Solutions project. Dr. Noone has conducted PILPG justice system assessments in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire as well as provided transitional justice assistance in post-Gaddafi Libya and to the Syrian opposition. Dr. Noone was also part of the international effort investigating the Myanmar government’s atrocities committed against their Rohingya population. He worked as an investigator in the refugee camps in Bangladesh and as one of the legal experts on the report’s findings. Dr. Noone also worked as a Senior Program Officer for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent, nonpartisan federal institution created by the U.S. Congress to promote research, education, and training on the prevention, management and peaceful resolution of international conflicts. While at USIP, Noone received a Special Act Award for his work in Afghanistan. Dr. Noone is a Captain in the United States Navy and has served as the Commanding Officer of the Defense Institute of International Legal Studies (DIILS) reserve unit and as the Commanding Officer of the Navy JAG International and Operational Law reserve unit as well as the Director of the Department of Defense’s Periodic Review Secretariat (PRS). Dr. Noone previously served on active duty as a judge advocate in the U.S. Navy. He held various positions in the Navy including the Head of the International Law Branch and the Foreign Military Rights Affairs Branch in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) International and Operational Law Division at the Pentagon. Dr. Noone also served at the DIILS, where he trained senior military, governmental and non-governmental civilian personnel in the Law of Armed Conflict, Human Rights and other international law topics, in over sixty countries (and has been to 95 countries). Most notably, he has trained members of the Iraqi National Congress, the post- genocide government in Rwanda, the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan, civil society in the Sudan, and senior members of the Russian government. Dr. Noone is the co-author (with Laurie R. Blank) of the widely used textbook: International Law and Armed Conflict: Fundamental Principles and Contemporary Challenges in the Law of War Second Edition (Aspen / Wolters Kluwer Publishing 2019).