The Open Society Institute (OSI)

The OSI's Network Women’s Program
and Open Society Justice Initiative

Invite you to a panel discussion on

Gender and Transitional Justice:
Pursuing Justice and Accountability
in Post-Conflict Situations

7 February 2006
3:00 - 5:00 pm

Open Society Institute
400 West 59th Street
(between 9th and 10th Ave)
New York

Transitional justice mechanisms and post-conflict reconciliation efforts often neglect the complex ways political violence affects the lives of women. Opportunities for gender justice in reconciliation contexts remain tragically under-realized. Panelists will discuss a wide-range of issues related to gender and transitional justice around the world, including sexual violence, tribunals, reparations, international criminal law, the relationship between gender justice at the international and national levels, LGBT issues, memory and resistance.


Introduction by
Aryeh Neier, President, OSI

Panelists (see below for bios)

Kelly Dawn Askin
Open Society Justice Initiative

Tracey Gurd
Open Society Justice Initiative

Kelli Muddell
Intl. Center for Transitional Justice

Vasuki Nesiah
Intl. Center for Transitional Justice

Ruth Rubio Marín
Intl. Center for Transitional Justice

Debra Schultz
Network Women’s Program, OSI

RSVP to Emilie Neumann: eneumann@sorosny.org or 212-548-0137
(please include name, address, email and phone)

*** refreshments provided**

Panelists’ Bios

Dr. Kelly Dawn Askin
Open Society Justice Initiative
Dr. Kelly Dawn Askin, BS, JD, PhD (law) currently serves as Senior Legal Officer, International Justice, with Open Society Justice Initiative. She is also a 2004-2005 Fulbright New Century Scholar on the Global Empowerment of Women and Fellow, Yale Law School. Kelly has taught or served as a visiting scholar at Notre Dame, Washington College of Law, Harvard, and Yale. She also served as Executive Director of the International Criminal Justice Institute and American University’s War Crimes Research Office. Kelly has served as an expert consultant, legal advisor, or international law trainer to prosecutors, judges, and registry at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Serious Crimes Unit in East Timor, the International Criminal Court, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She has lectured in over 65 countries and has published extensively in international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and gender justice, including her book War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals (1997) and the three volume treatise Women and International Human Rights Law (1999, 2001, 2002, co-editor). She serves on the board of several organizations, including the Executive Board of the American Branch of the International Law Association, the International Judicial Academy, International Criminal Law Services, and the International Journal of Criminal Law.

Tracey Gurd
Open Society Justice Initiative
Tracey Gurd serves as the junior legal officer for the International Justice program with the Open Society Justice Initiative. She has previously served as a journalist, an academic fellow in law, and an international policy advisor for the Australian government in both Australia and Central Europe. Tracey is the joint editor of an academic collection on women and armed conflict.

Kelli Muddell
International Center for Transitional Justice
M. Kelli Muddell graduated from North Park College of Chicago with a BA in Sociology in 1996. She received a Presidential Fellowship to attend Fordham University, where she earned an MA in International Political Economy and Development with a concentration in Development Studies. While in graduate school, she interned in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, and was a contributing writer for its World Report 2000.

Aryeh Neier
President, Open Society Institute
Before joining the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Soros foundations network as president in September 1993, Aryeh Neier spent 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder. Prior to that, he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years, including eight as national director. From 1978 to 1991, Neier served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University, and he has lectured at a number of colleges and universities in the United States (including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, New York University, and the University of California at Berkeley) and at universities in many other countries. He is the recipient of three honorary doctorates (Hofstra University, Hamilton College, and the State University of New York at Binghamton) and the American Bar Association's Gavel Award. Neier is the author of six books: Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You (1975, Scarborough House); Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution (1976, Stein and Day); Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and the Risks of Freedom (1979, E.P. Dutton); Only Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change (1982, Wesleyan University Press); War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (1998, Times Books); and Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights (2003, Public Affairs). Neier has also contributed chapters to more than 25 books. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, a columnist for the Nation, and has also published in such periodicals as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, Dissent and a number of law journals. He has contributed more than 100 op-ed articles to newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Neier was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. An internationally recognized expert on human rights, he has conducted investigations of human rights abuses in more than 40 countries around the world. Over the past two decades, he has been directly engaged in the global debate on accountability and bringing to justice those who have committed crimes against humanity, the subject of his latest book, Taking Liberties. He played a leading role in the establishment of the international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia.

Vasuki Nesiah
International Center for Transitional Justice
Originally from Sri Lanka, Vasuki Nesiah joined the ICTJ following a teaching fellowship with the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School and a consultancy on minority rights and conflict resolution with the Rockefeller Foundation. She has published and lectured in international and comparative law, feminist theory, law and development, postcolonial studies, constitutionalism, and governance in plural societies. She is also an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University where she teaches in the Human Rights Program of the School of Public and International Affairs (SIPA). She completed her doctorate in public international law at Harvard Law School, where she also received her JD with honors. She holds a BA in philosophy and political science from Cornell University. She was also a visiting student of philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University.

Ruth Rubio Marín
Professor of Law, New York University
Ruth Rubio Marín is Professor of Public Law at the University of Seville, Spain and part of the Hauser Global Law School Program and New York University. She is author and editor of several books including Immigration as a Democratic Challenge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; editor of Mujer e Igualdad: la Norma y su Aplicación (Women and Equality: the Norm and its Application), Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer, Sevilla, 1999 and co-editor of The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence, Cambridge University Press, 2004. She is also the author of several articles and book chapters including “Women and the Cost of Transition to Democratic Constitutionalism in Spain”, International Sociology, 2003, vol 18 (1) and “Constitutional Domestication of International Gender Norms: Categorizations, Illustrations and Reflections from the Nearside of the Bridge” with M. Morgan, in Gender and Human Rights, K. Knopp (editor), Oxford University Press, 2004. She has taught at different North American academic institutions including Princeton University and Columbia Law School and has worked as a consultant in antidiscrimination theory and policy for the European Commission. She is currently working as a consultant for the International Center for Transitional Justice managing a major research project on gender and reparations in societies undergoing transition to democracy.

Debra Schultz
Network Women’s Program, Open Society Institute
Dr. Debra L. Schultz is Director of Programs for the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundations) Network Women’s Program, which promotes the advancement of women’s human rights as an integral part of building open societies. At OSI, she works to build regional women’s networks, including gender studies networks, and to develop new frameworks for women’s human rights activism, including the Romani women’s rights movement (the subject of her current research). She is the author of Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York University Press). Her work as a feminist oral historian focuses on documenting women’s cross-racial alliances for social change. She is the former Assistant Director of the National Council for Research on Women.