Pablo de Greiff to launch first Annual Justice Lecture hosted by Lawyers for Justice in Libya and SOAS
The UN’s first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Pablo de Greiff, will be speaking at SOAS University of London this month.
The event will take place on 28 January 2019 and will form the first Annual Justice Lecture at SOAS, hosted jointly by Lawyers for Justice in Libya, a Libyan and international independent non-governmental organisation, and SOAS’s Centre for Human Rights Law.
Pablo de Greiff was appointed by the President of the UN Human Rights Council as a Rapporteur in the group of experts to advise on the Council’s prevention role. He has lectured in many universities around the world, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia and NYU, and published extensively on transitions to democracy and the relationship between morality, politics and law.
He is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at the School of Law at New York University.
The aim of the event is to create an open and varied dialogue on justice and human rights in Libya and to promote greater understanding and engagement with these issues. With Libya being labelled by many as a “failed state”, this inaugural lecture will explore what justice means in this context and how notions of transitional justice are useful in the non-typical scenarios we face today.
Elham Saudi, the Director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya, said:
“We are proud to have Pablo de Greiff give the first Annual Justice Lecture. We know that he will bring a unique insight that is both intellectual and practical to the Libyan scene.”
Dr Lutz Oette, Director of the Centre for Human Rights Law at SOAS, said:
“Rather than writing off the question of justice in Libya as an exercise in futility, exploring its meaning in the context of ongoing violence and weak state institutions promises opening up new avenues for imaginative and constructive engagement.
"SOAS provides a fitting space for this first annual lecture, hosted jointly with a major non-governmental organisation in the field, Lawyers for Justice in Libya, to explore the multiple dimensions and challenges of 'justice' in the country and beyond.”
The event will be the first of a series of annual lectures designed to explore questions of justice related to Libya or using Libya as a case study.
(Source: Lawyers for Justice in Libya - LFJL)