Principal speaker
Associate Professor Barbora Hola
Associate Professor Barbora Hola (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will discuss the ARC Discovery Grant she has been developing with Dr Olivera Simic. The project provisionally entitled 'Punishment of Transition' - International Penal Practices and Local Transitional Justice.
This interdisciplinary research will analyse and compare international penal practices, their impact on convicted individuals, and on local transitional processes. International criminal tribunals (ICTs), such as the one for former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone or the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), have together convicted over 200 individuals for their involvement in "the most serious crimes of international concern", e.g. genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.
International prisoners have been serving their sentences scattered around prisons in European and African countries. A large majority of convicts have already been released. Anecdotal evidence shows many possible post-release trajectories. Some end up in prisons again; some go back to their communities and acknowledge their wrongdoing, apologise and try to reconcile with victims; some continue to deny, justify their crimes, which leads to further frustration and disappointment of victims; some engage in politics or in educating future generations. Despite abundant scholarly literature on international criminal trials and international criminal law, there has only been very limited attention on international penal practices e.g. punishment, incarceration, rehabilitation and reintegration of international prisoners.
So far, no study has assessed the role of individuals tried by the ICTs in local transitional justice processes. This research will fill this gap. It will systematically analyse how international penal practices affect convicted individuals, and through them local transitional justice proccesses. It will explore post-trial trajectories of international prisoners and evaluate how these individuals shape and influence (or not) transitional justice processes in their communities following their release.
About the speaker
Barbora Hola works as a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and as Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
About this seminar
Barbora will present her Law Futures Seminar at the Griffith Law School (N61) Nathan campus with a videolink to the Griffith Law School (G36) Gold Coast campus.