Why Truth and Justice Matter in Colombia, Expert Panel

Transitional Justice Institute: Public Lectures and Events

This panel event was co-hosted by the TJI, Christian Aid Ireland and ABColombia.

This event explored the upcoming report of the Truth Commission in Colombia, with a focus on two innovative measures within the Colombian transitional justice approach: the role of business in conflict and peacebuilding, and the exclusion of crimes of sexual and gender based violence from amnesties in the Colombian conflict. The panel examined the intersectionality between gender and ethnic discrimination and conflict sexual violence in Colombia.

SPEAKERS

Eamon Gilmore is the European Union Special Representative for Human Rights (since March 2019) and has also served as EU Special Envoy for the Colombian Peace Process since October 2015. He was Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade from 2011 until July 2014.

Pablo de Greiff is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at NYU. He was the UN’s first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. He is former Research Director for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College.

Laura Bernal-Bermúdez is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She is also affiliated to the Latin American Centre of the University of Oxford as a research consultant.

Their new book, with Gabriel Pereira, is Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability from Below: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tracks and analyses transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world.

María Adelaida Palacio Puerta is a lawyer specializing in education for citizenship and a lecturer in human rights with a background in teaching, consulting, working as a public official and work in women’s organisations. She served as Undersecretary of Government of Bogotá; coordinator of the legal area of Corporación Humanas; consultant for the National Women's Network, IOM and USAID. Currently, currently she works as Manager of the Sisma Mujer Corporation, a partner of Christian Aid Ireland.