- Hell, good evening, everyone.
Thank you, first of all,
for braving this weather,
this is very far away,
for braving this weather and
coming and joining us tonight.
I hope that you are warm and
comfortable and settled in.
My name is Deborah Popowski.
I am the Executive Director
of the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice
here at NYU School of Law,
and on behalf of our
center and our cohosts,
the International Center
for Transitional Justice,
and the rest of NYU Law community,
I wanna say thank you
and welcome to this year's
Emilio Mignone Lecture.
Before I move to substance,
a few points of order.
Hopefully you all have a program
and you can see the full agenda there.
We're starting a little bit
late but we're still gonna,
probably no one will
run shorter (chuckles)
than they intended to,
but you'll see that we do.
Our guest, Pablo de
Greiff, will be speaking
for about 40 minutes.
And following his lecture,
there will be a robust,
we hope, period for engagement
with all of you in the room
and an opportunity to
ask questions and engage.
And the program will end
with a reception around eight o'clock.
I've also been asked
to call your attention
to our hashtag for this event.
It's #EMLecture.
So those of you who are on Twitter,
please go ahead and tweet
any piece of this that is of interest.
Also just so that you know,
this event is being recorded.
If I speak over here,
can you still hear me?
Yes? Okay, great.
This event is being recorded
and it's also being live streamed.
So please keep that in mind.
I am delighted and also moved
to deliver the welcome,
this year in particular
as it's a special year, I
think, for a few reasons.
One, it's the 10th lecture.
And knowing that it was the 10th lecture
as we were preparing pushed
us, as milestones tend to do,
to pause and reflect on where we are,
where we've been and where we're headed.
Hence the genesis of tonight's theme,
the future of the past,
in which we'll be asked to look backwards
and forward and then back again
in order to make sense of
how to live with our present.
It's also special because we have members
of the Mignone family
here with us tonight.
And having them here
gives us an opportunity
to really reconnect with
the person and the family
whose legacy we honor through this series
and on whose shoulders we stand.
The chance to meet and
share this moment with you,
Isabel and Mario, holds personal meaning
for me, as an Argentinian
human rights lawyer.
I was born in Buenos Aires
in 1979 under military rule,
but my family left in 1982.
Growing up in my household,
there wasn't much discussion
about the Proceso.
But there was this copy of Nunca Mas,
1985 edition, that sat on their bookshelf.
I got my hands on it at a very young age.
I realize how young now that I'm a mother.
And looking back, I can
draw a really clear line
between my desire to make sense
of the testimonies and
the maps and the lists
that I discovered through this book
and the work that I do today.
And that learning involves
really steeping myself
in the work of your parents,
Emilio and Chela Mignone and the movements
and institutions they helped build.
And finally, it's a special year
because tonight we're
celebrating and paying tribute
to another, there he is,
brilliant and beautiful soul,
my colleague, friend
and a person whom I deeply
respect, Pablo de Greiff.
You will be hearing shortly from Fernando
about Pablo's tremendous
contributions to the field.
So for now, I am only
allowed to say a little.
And I'll say that only in
addition to his public work,
Pablo has directed our center's
Transitional Justice Program since 2014,
and in that role has taught and advised
dozens of NYU law students
and enriched CHRGJ's
programs with his expertise.
Pablo is also one of the kindest people
I've ever worked with.
I am not alone in feeling this way.
Earlier today, at lunch, another colleague
used unprompted exactly the
same words to describe him.
He approaches everyone with
a humility and a respect
that is rare for a man of his level
of formal learning and
professional stature.
I have learned as much from
his sensitivity and humanity
as I have from his experience.
So Pablo, I just wanna take
this moment to thank you
on behalf of all your CHRGJ
colleagues and students.
It brings us tremendous joy
to mark your contributions to the field
with this lecture tonight.
(audience applauds)
The Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice
and the ICTJ have been close partners
for going on two decades now.
Our relationship dates back to the days
when Alex Boraine led the ICTJ.
Alex, who is Deputy Chair
of the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission,
also taught at NYU from 1998 to 2001
and served as the Inaugural Director
of its Transitional Justice Program.
And that partnership then continued
with Paul Manziel and now Pablo.
And this lecture became a flagship event
for both organizations.
It was designed to capture and advance
the public understanding of the field,
to honor and learn from those
who have been carving out new space in it
and pushing us to think creatively,
critically and constructively
about how to repair, and
even more importantly,
prevent, human-created atrocity.
Last year we hosted Sherrilyn
Ifill and Darren Walker
from the NAACP Legal and
Educational Defense Fund
and the Ford Foundation, respectively,
who led us in a thought provoking
and necessary conversation
on the legacy of slavery
in the United States
and whether and how
transitional justice concepts
could contribute to dismantling
enduring structural racism.
Other guests have included Hossam Bahgat
of the Egyptian Initiative
for Personal Rights,
then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein,
and Helen Clark, to name just a few.
So given the goals of this lecture,
it's not surprising that
those who conceived of it
would have chosen to name it
after Emilio Fermin Mignone,
one of the most influential
lawyer advocates of his generation,
whose documentation, litigation,
institution-building,
writing and personal advocacy
helped define this field into being.
He and his wife, Angelica
Sada Mignione, or Chela,
had a profound impact on human rights
in Argentina and beyond.
Together with others whose
children and loved ones
had been disappeared,
they founded the CELS,
the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales,
an organization that, in the
thick of the dictatorship,
performed astonishing work
documenting disappearances
and went on to become one
of the leading human
rights NGOs in the region.
This is only one of many
institutions and movements
that they touched.
Chela was a notable human rights
advocate in her own right.
She was a co-founded of
Madres de Plaza de Mayo
and was part of the first
delegation of mothers
to travel internationally
to denounce the regime.
And then there was Monica,
whose own human rights commitment
as a social worker and teacher,
working with people living
in poverty, was so strong,
whose commitment was so strong
that it was seen as a threat to the junta.
It was her kidnapping at age 24
that led Emilio and Chela down the path
that we now know them for.
But in revisiting interviews and writings
to prepare for tonight, I was
struck by Monica's own fire
and the beauty and fierceness of that.
I also learned that Chela in her youth
had done work similar to that
that Monica was doing at the time,
and then a fuller picture
of the family's courage
and conscience began to take shape for me.
So it's impossible and rather painful
in a matter of minutes
to even try to begin
to do justice to the legacy of this family
and the grief and loss that underpins it.
But we hope that just bringing
their spirit into the room
gives you a window into the story
behind this particular program
and why we value it so much.
I now have the lovely
pleasure of introducing you
to Fernando Travesi, Executive
Director of the ICTJ.
Fernando has over two
decades of experience
in transitional justice,
human rights and rule of law.
His geographically and fanatically diverse
range of experience is dizzying.
He joined the ICTJ in 2014.
Before then, he was with the UNDP
as Director of the Transitional
Justice Basket Fund
in Colombia and a Senior
Justice Advisor in Tunisia.
He has worked for the ICRC
in Nepal and Colombia,
for the Spanish Red Cross in Sierra Leone,
and for Movimiento por la Paz
as Regional Director for the Balkans
and as Country Director in Albania
during the Kosovo War.
Fernando is also a lawyer,
a Visiting Professor at
universities in several countries,
and here's my favorite part about him,
he's also a practicing
novelist and playwright,
(audience chuckles)
because why not,
whose many awards include the prestigious
Spanish National Theater Prize.
So thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, everybody.
Thank you for being here.
Good night.
I just wanna take a few minutes
to reflect on Emilio Mignione's
legacies in Argentina,
but also we could think
about Syria, Yemen,
Venezuela, Gambia, Colombia, Tunisia,
Central African Republic,
Armenia, Myanmar.
When we read the newspapers each morning
or when we watch the evening news,
we are often confronted
with human tragedy,
with the pain and the suffering
that always accompany mass
violence around the world.
Armed conflicts, political repressions,
authoritarian regimes, dictatorships,
they all invariably leave behind
a long trail of human rights violations.
Frequently this trail is so long
and it reaches so vast
that it takes decades or even generations
to address the impacts
and other consequences
of such dark and disturbing legacies.
Mass atrocities and systematic
abuses devastate families,
whole communities and entire societies.
The lives of thousands,
hundred of thousands,
sometimes millions, are brutally cut short
or shattered completely.
Political, legal and social institutions,
such as parliaments, the judiciary,
the security forces and education systems,
are left severely weakened,
unstable or politicized,
if they have not completely collapsed.
The social contract that is
the unspoken public trust
we have in each other
and in our institutions
to govern according to the rule of law
is perhaps one of the
greatest invisible casualties.
Because although we often
take it for granted,
this (mumbles) trust, this
belief in the rule of law,
is very fragile and can easily crumble.
Once destroyed, however,
restoring this trust among citizens
and between citizens and the state
is a complex and multilayer process
that requires numerous strategies,
consistent efforts and investment,
and not least of all, patience and time.
In the unforgiving news
cycles in which we live,
we are often exposed, at
least for a few minutes,
to the heartbreaking
images of violent conflict
and its repercussions.
Waves of displayed families and refugees
(mumbles) seeking safety,
indiscriminate and deadly attacks
on civilians, including children,
civilian targets such
as schools or hospitals,
victims of chemical or forbidden weapons,
systematic suppression
of political opponents
or groups that are often
already marginalized
or excluded for racial,
religious or other reasons.
We get glimpses of the human beings
caught up in these tragic circumstances.
We hear soundbites of their testimonies.
Some of them suffered illegal detention,
unspeakable torture, sexual
or gender-based violence.
Many others lament the
loss of family members
or anxiously wait news of relatives
who are missing or were
forcibly disappeared.
Regrettably, the voices
and rights of victims
are frequently drowned out and overlooked
in the loud and confusing cacophony
of polarizing narratives, propaganda,
and fixated on superficial
ideological positions
that often supplant respect for
the most basic human rights.
But once the spotlight
of any particular emergency fades out,
once the news cycle turns its attention
away from the victims,
what happen to them?
How are they able to cope
and rebuild their lives?
How do they get any
redress or acknowledgement?
What happens to the
perpetrators of the crimes
or other people responsible
for those crimes?
How can members of these
societies come to terms
with the legacies of abuse?
How can they reconcile
with their neighbors
and with the state that,
instead of defending
and protecting their rights,
targeted or attacked its own citizens?
Anyone who has sat down with victims
and listened to their personal stories
understands that coping
with the consequences
of serious human rights violation
is a lifelong challenge.
If we want to break
the cycles of violence,
if we want to achieve peace and justice,
there is no way to do so
without addressing the
root causes of conflicts
and victims' demands for justice.
Nowadays the world has
agreed to a global agenda,
the sustainable development goals,
as a blueprint to achieve a better
and more sustainable future for all.
While the agenda provides a framework
for eradicating poverty and hunger,
conquering climate change,
providing education for all
and assuring gender equality,
it also calls for sustainable peace
and for just and inclusive societies,
which at the end of today
are the required foundation
to pave the way toward
achieving all the other goals.
In countries devastated by conflict
and massive human rights violations,
the challenges to create such peaceful,
just and inclusive societies
with access to justice for all
could not be greater.
And to do so requires long-term engagement
and the design and
implementation of sustainable,
tailored multifaceted
approaches and measures.
And that is what we do
at the International Center
for Transitional Justice.
For almost 20 years, ICTJ has worked
in more than 50 countries
to help put an end to cycles of violence,
exclusion and impunity.
We work with civil society organizations,
with government representatives,
and with international community
to bring redress to victims,
to reestablish the rule of law,
to build just and inclusive institutions
and help societies to find their way
to address the legacy of a
troubled and violent past.
We have always taken a
rights-based approach in our work,
as we never lose sight
of the value of justice
as a principle in itself,
the importance of victims' dignity
and the rights to truth,
reparation and accountability.
We often begin to work
when a conflict is ongoing
and we stay long after it has ended.
Transitional justice is
about all the social,
political, legal, ethical
and philosophical dilemmas
that we confront in the
aftermath of atrocities
and massive violence.
It is about the hard questions
that we have to answer
as individuals and as a society
to deal with the violent past.
What are the root causes of that violence?
Who has the greater responsibility?
How can they be held accountable?
How can victims be
acknowledged and repaired?
How can we move forward?
How will we reconcile
and live again together
in a society where everyone
enjoys their rights?
These questions are not new.
They have always been there.
And the world has had to
ask them many, many times.
And perhaps one of the merits
of transitional justice
is bringing all of these
questions together.
If there is someone who has helped
finding answers to these questions
and who has shaped the field
of transitional justice,
is our speaker of tonight.
He directs the Transitional
Justice Program
at NYU Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice.
Until very recently, he has set (stutters)
for six years as the first
UN Special Rapporteur
on the Promotion of Truth, Justice,
Reparation and Guarantees
of Non-Recurrence.
Since the very foundation
of ICTJ until 2014,
he was also the Director of Research
at the International Center
for Transitional Justice
and he's still a distinguished
member of its advisory board.
He holds a BA from Yale University,
a PhD from Northwestern University.
And beyond his numerous
books, publications,
articles, lessons on this matter,
he has accumulated decades
of practical experience,
advising and following very closely
transitional justice processes
and bodies around the world.
Peru, Guatemala, Morocco, the Philippines,
Colombia, where he was born,
and during his term as
a Special Rapporteur,
he conducted country visits to Uruguay,
the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland,
Tunisia and Spain and Burundi,
and deliver more than a dozen reports
to the Human Rights Council
and the UN General Assembly.
Besides, he's a vital resource
to countless victims' organizations
and institutional focus
on transitional justice,
gender issues and development.
But more importantly,
he's a great gentleman,
he has a great heart and a long
life commitment to justice.
He's an example for all of us.
Is a great pleasure and a great honor
to introduce the professor, the activist,
the colleague and the
friend, Pablo de Greiff.
(audience applauds)
- I am more touched than I can say
by the two extraordinarily
generous introductions,
about which I always
feel a bit of ambivalence
because they almost always guarantee
that what follows is a
total disappointment.
(audience laughs)
It also reminds me of, in a
much less friendly setting,
after I had been appointed
the first Special Rapporteur
on transitional justice,
and it was an academic setting
to discuss what in the title was mentioned
as the transitional justice industry.
Someone told me, "And you are the CEO."
(audience laughs)
And that was not meant as a compliment.
In any case, I am more
grateful than I can say
for this huge, huge honor.
I am honored and very, very
humbled by the invitation.
The list of speakers
that has been mentioned that preceded me
is an incredibly, incredibly
distinguished one.
I have learned a lot from them
and from many people in the audience.
And I cannot go through each of those.
But of course I would like to say
that I have learned a lot
from very long-term partners
in transitional justice debates,
even when it was not
originally their own field
but eventually they agreed to
participate with me in them.
And I learned a lot.
Margaret Walker, who is here
and was an early participant
in a research project,
Sam Ee-sah-ha-doo from NYU,
who is an expert on transitional justice
and agreed to participate in a project
that I organized when
I was new at the ICTJ,
Jim Goldstone, Steven Rapp,
there are too many of you to recognize.
But Ha-nee Me-gad-lee,
a long, long-term colleague of the ICTJ.
So again, there are too many people
from whom I have learned,
too much to list you individually.
But it is a great pleasure to be here.
We have not only started late,
but I will also be very interested
in having our conversations.
I will try to keep my remarks
well below the 40 minutes
that Deborah mentioned.
But in any case, going back to the honor,
and to the very distinguished people
who preceded me in this podium,
I am absolutely sure and
I know this for a fact,
that part of the reason why they accepted
the original invitation was
because of the Mignone
name in the lecture.
This is a name that is
extraordinarily important
in the transitional justice field.
I think that the family,
through what I take
to be absolutely heroic efforts
to clear the pain of the abduction
of one of the five children
in order to reinforce activism commitment
that they had started long before
and made the contributions
that were also mentioned
and that I will not repeat here before.
But Emilio ended up establishing CELS
along with Angelica.
Angelica went to become
one of the original members
and founding members of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
and in this way had a huge, huge impact
on the Argentinian transition,
and subsequently in other
transitions around the world.
So it is an honor for me to be here
and I am very grateful
that Isabel and Mario,
the author of an excellent biography
of Emilio and his
family, are here tonight.
Thank you very much.
I also would like to take a few seconds
to recognize the passing of Alex Boraine
last December 5th.
Alex, as was mentioned also,
was a Methodist minister,
a member of parliament in South Africa,
who resigned in 1986 his seat
because of the all-white nature
of the South African parliament.
Went on to establish IDASA, the Institute
for the Development of
Alternatives for South Africa,
which was very, very important
in providing conceptions
of how the South African
transition could proceed,
including the transitional justice field.
Was appointed by President Mandela
the Deputy Chair of the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And then subsequently came to NYU,
eventually to establish the ICTJ.
So it is true that in the
transitional justice world,
we stand on the shoulders of giants.
And I think that it is
that sort of determination,
if I may be allowed a personal comment,
that inspires me and my energy
and I always think about families
who have suffered what
some of them have suffered.
And I say, every day they get out of bed
and they take care of life.
And beyond taking care of life,
they maintain the struggle
to achieve justice,
justice which most of
them have never received
by their own systems.
And if they do not give
up, we cannot give up.
So my respect to all of you
and my gratitude for the example.
I would like in my brief comments
to divide the intervention
in three different parts.
The first one, some preliminary remarks
in order to situate my talk.
And then to further parts one,
trying to outline some of the achievements
of the field of transitional justice.
And in the final part, to
sketch some of the challenges
that I think that the field is facing.
So let me start with
the preliminary remarks.
I am now of this age
in which I have to choose
between seeing my paper
or seeing you.
(audience laughs)
And I think it is better
if I can see my papers.
So let me get my.
(audience chuckles)
Okay, this should help me
get through the handwritten
55 pages sooner.
(audience laughs)
I'm kidding.
I have proposed to talk
about the future of the past,
meaning of course the future
of dealing with the past,
which is another way of referring
to transitional justice.
We should keep in mind that, for example,
the German Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung,
working through the past,
long appreciated the term
transitional justice.
Before talking about the future,
I would like to make a
few introductory remarks
to situate my talk,
and then to divide my intervention,
as I mentioned, into two further parts,
the second on what I take the
field to have accomplished
followed by one on some
of the important challenges it faces.
In thinking about the future
of dealing with the past,
perhaps one should take solace
from the fact that a problematic past,
by which I mean one which includes massive
and systematic violations and abuses,
does not go away.
This has been tried, in fact.
It does not work.
The persistence of the past is obvious.
But I actually think that it deserves
much more systematic attention
than it has received.
Most work on transitional justice
simply takes it for granted
that the past does not go away.
And while this is true,
I think that much more needs to be said.
It would help us understand
what we are trying to achieve,
which is essential for doing it better,
something that I think
we urgently need to do.
One should say to begin with
that in doing transitional justice,
which, by the way, I understand
as a comprehensive policy
that has been implemented in order to deal
with the legacies of
massive and systematic
violations and abuses
and to restore the, or to establish anew
the currency of human rights,
a policy that has as
its core truth, justice,
reparations and guarantees
of non-recurrence.
In doing transitional justice,
one is trying to achieve a
minimal sense of justice.
Transitional justice, as all justice
and rights-related work,
rests, at least from my standpoint,
on a deontological base.
We try to achieve justice
because it is the right thing to do,
because we owe it to the victims
and to others as a matter of right.
Justice, from my standpoint, is not merely
one more good to be plotted
in an indifference curve.
Justice is supposed to
be part of the framework
which gives meaning to the very exercise
of drawing indifference curves.
This is, however, true
for justice in general,
not for particular justice programs.
The latter cannot be indifferent
to consequences, to costs, and to impacts.
And here I think it is
important to be modest.
Like it has been said of peace agreements,
I think that transitional
justice is not meant
to take people to heaven,
it is meant to take people out of hell.
I am happy to elaborate on the importance
of modesty later on.
Transitional justice, I want to insist,
is not a universal policy tool,
a cure for all sorts of maladies.
It is a small, albeit important, part
of a broader transformative agenda.
But the question remains
about the amazing endurance of the past,
the fact that it does not go away,
that for example efforts to bribe people
by offering them economic
development instead of justice
may work for a while, but
only that, for a while.
In an article that I wrote
now almost 20 years ago,
I put the point in the following terms.
There are things that we
cannot reasonably expect
our fellow citizens to forget.
To simplify greatly,
this is simply a function
of our ability to learn.
Elsewhere, I developed a bit
some aspects of the
phenomenology of victimhood
in order to explain some of the effects
of the massive and
systematic rights violations,
the effects that they leave in their wake,
including a sense of isolation,
social fragmentation and civic mistrust,
effects that manifest
themselves multi-generationally,
as some of you, but particularly
(mumbles) has worked in.
So be that as it may,
the first point I would like to stress
is that in many ways,
dealing with the past
is not an option.
In the early days of transitional justice,
Spain and Mozambique were
often used as counterexamples.
I always thought that this was inept,
that although neither country had appealed
to the traditional transitional
justice mechanisms,
both had in fact done
significant work on their past
through other means.
Now it is even harder
to use these two countries
as counterexamples
because they are, in fact, experimenting
with the familiar
transitional justice tools.
At some point or another,
although one must acknowledge
that it usually takes longer
than we originally thought,
a reckoning becomes inevitable
because the legacies of
violations become unbearable,
morally, psychologically, culturally,
and even developmentally.
Now if enthusiasts of transitional justice
can take some solace from the fact
that dealing with the past
is eventually inevitable.
As Faulkner in his Requiem for a Nun said,
"The past is never dead.
"It is not even past."
No one, however, should be complacent.
The world, as a recent report
in The Economist put it,
is "fixated on the past."
We are, it seems, going
through a fit of nostalgia.
But these are not the
worries about the past
that I want to address here.
There is, I think, a
good paper to be written
about the resurgence of
grievances of old empires.
But obviously these are the
not the core of my work,
nor will they be the
subject of my talk tonight,
although I have to confess
that they do keep me
up at night frequently
for geopolitically, those grievances are
potentially quite dangerous.
Redressing massive human rights violations
is not made easier, however,
in the context of the type of nostalgia
that is sweeping many countries,
including powerful ones like
where we find ourselves.
Which brings me to the last three
very brief preliminary points
which make work on human
and justice-related work,
including work on transitional justice,
significantly more challenging today
than, say, in the early 2000s,
when things looked very bright indeed.
There is no question that the task
is much more difficult today,
by the great selectivity
in the implementation
of human rights norms,
by the tendency to securitize
all sorts of topics
as if there were existential threats
that justified emergency
measures left and right,
and by what has been called
the closing of civic space.
There is no question that in a context
in which the very
vocabulary of human rights
has lost a lot of instruction
and which, even within the United Nations,
the guardian of human rights covenants,
the term is now largely avoided
in preference for
substitutes such as equality,
nondiscrimination, and
even more distantly,
in favor of framing arguments
in developmental terms,
talking about transitional justice
is much more difficult than it used to be.
So, preliminary remarks.
Now, and yet, I do not think
that we should lose sight
of the field's great accomplishments.
I will skip without much remark the fact
that the field managed
to consolidate itself
despite the centrifugal forces
that characterized its beginnings,
as the beginnings of most of the fields
that defend implementation
of a plurality of measures.
Not because I do not consider
the consolidation of the
field to be an accomplishment,
but because I have remarked
upon it many times before,
including in an effort to work
out what it means precisely
to think about the field holistically,
a claim that is often made
but seldomly explained.
Nor will I linger on the fact
that the field has become a field,
academically, in terms of practice,
as an object of international cooperation,
for similar reasons.
And finally, I will understate
the normalization of the field,
the fact that it is now
a normal expectation
for states that are undergoing
various forms of transitions
to implement these measures.
But this last point we
should not underestimate.
Achieving normative change
in a relatively short period of time,
around 30 years, is a huge accomplishment.
I will describe the
accomplishments of the field
in the following terms.
Transitional justice has unpacked,
and in that sense, helped
to give richer content
to the notion of justice that is relevant
in the wake of massive and
systematic violations and abuses.
The very list of constituent futures,
not nearly criminal
justice but reparations,
truth, and guarantees of
non-recurrence, manifests this.
But one can go further.
Transitional justice has
helped to entrench rights
to justice, truth and reparations
that 30 years ago were largely fictions
for the overwhelming majority of victims
of human rights violations and abuses.
And it has done it not only doctrinally
but also, importantly, practically.
In the justice domain, for example,
by teaching countries how
to cope with amnesties,
with issues of retroactivity,
with statues of limitations,
by developing prosecutorial strategy
and by helping to give the
international community
incentives to create a variety of forums,
hybrids, international tribunals,
in which those cases can be tried.
In the domain of truth,
by the introduction of truth commissions,
commissions of inquiry, and
other investigatory tools.
In the domain of
reparations by introducing
massive administrative reparation programs
with complex benefits.
These were not things that
existed before the field.
So the progress is not
simply a matter of texts.
It is a matter of practice.
The implementation of these
measures around the world
has made a very significant difference
to 10s of thousands of
people, if not more.
And it has also had systemic effects.
In a reconstructive spirit, I have argued
that transitional justice has provided
recognition to victims not only as victims
but also as rights holders,
that it has promoted civic trust,
that it has the potential to
strengthen the rule of law,
and it has the potential
to promote social integration
or reconciliation.
So these are not small achievements.
And one could illustrate
this with stories,
both at the micro level of individuals
that tell you, I used to
consider myself a victim,
now I consider myself a citizen,
at the meso level by thinking
about legislative reforms
that, for instance, change the practices
of the security forces,
at the macro level by
constitutional reforms
that have a huge impact,
for example by the introduction
of constitutional courts
like the Colombian constitutional
court, for instance,
that has meant a tremendous
amount of protection
for Colombian citizens.
So I think that this has,
to a certain extent, worked.
Now my closing remarks.
Now of course not everything
is a cause for celebration.
Quite aside from the fact
that there are many ways
of getting transitional justice wrong,
including, for example,
by establishing procedures
that do not respect basic rule of law
and due process requirements,
by using the measures as instruments
of what I call turn taking,
I used to be on the downside
and now I get into power
and I will use transitional
justice to benefit my friends,
by politicizing transitional
justice instruments et cetera.
Of the long list of challenges
facing transitional justice today,
I would like to concentrate first
on three related ones
which I will mention in a single sentence.
Transitional justice has become
insufficiently attentive to context,
it has become formulaic,
and it has become technocratic.
Now let me disaggregate these critiques,
because although they are related,
they can be analyzed separately.
First, attentiveness to context.
Transitional justice, in a nutshell,
developed in order to redress
a particular set of violations
in a particular set of conflict,
namely, the post-authoritarian transitions
of the Latin American southern (mumbles).
These were countries
that were very broadly
and very deeply institutionalized.
And by that I mean that the
institutions of the state
had the capacity to
make themselves present
in every corner of the state's territory.
Didn't mean that they did so.
It just meant that they could.
Similarly, these were not countries
that suffered from huge legal vacuums.
Most of the important topics
in the interrelationship
between citizens and the state
were already regulated by means of law,
which again, it doesn't mean
that all the laws were equally wise,
that they were effectively enforced.
But again the point is that
these were not countries
that suffered from huge legal vacuums.
And the strength of the institutions
also correlated with the
crimes and the violations
of which they were capable.
Transitional justice as we know it today,
these four elements, took shape
in order to redress the typical violations
that come about from the
abusive exercise of state power.
Now, most transitional justice work today
is no longer done in contexts
that can be characterized in that way.
Most transitional justice
work today is done
in countries that are very
weakly institutionalized,
both horizontally and vertically.
That means that state
institutions are largely absent
from huge swaths of the
territories of the state.
These are countries with
the huge legal vacuums
in which neither the law nor courts
nor anyone else has
pronounced himself or herself
authoritatively on the relevant topics.
And of course where the violations
that need to be redressed
are totally unlike the
violations that come about
from the abusive exercise
of strong institutions
and resemble much more
something akin to social conflagration.
And I don't think that
transitional justice
has taken sufficiently
onboard those distinctions.
Let me illustrate it in this way.
When I presented my last report
to the Human Rights Council,
I run numbers very rapidly
about government income
per capita through taxation
at the moment when different countries
went through their transitions.
In 1990, when Chile went
through the transition,
the government received
almost $600 per capita
by means of taxation.
In 2002, when the Lome
Agreement was signed
for Sierra Leone,
the government received
more or less $48 per capita.
In 2000, when the agreement was born,
the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement for Liberia was signed,
the Liberian government
received $12 per capita.
In 2008, when the
government of Afghanistan
was in one of its many efforts
to achieve a peace agreement,
it received $8 per capita.
So just in political economy terms,
we are talking about
completely different worlds.
And now this is not an argument to say
that justice is a good, a luxury
that only the wealthy can afford.
It is an argument both for
the international community
to make itself much more present
in its delivery of justice
and an argument for thinking about
what is the proper model
for protecting the rights
of truth, justice and reparations
of people in contexts that
are radically different
from the contexts in which
the model took shape.
The second criticism that I made
is that transitional justice
has become a bit formulaic.
I will be very brief about this.
Organizational economists
have a name for the tendency
which I think applies
to transitional justice.
They call this isomorphic mimicry,
the tendency to copy institutional forms
and to assume that they work equally well
regardless of the context
in which they operate.
This is a problem that afflicts
not only transitional justice.
Perhaps the primary example
of isomorphic mimicry
in my mind is anti-corruption commissions.
Once the world came up with the idea
of an anti-corruption commission,
it simply replicated them everywhere
as if culture made no difference,
the division between formal
and informal parts of the
economy was irrelevant,
as if, for example, clan
structures and family habits
were totally irrelevant.
This, of course, is nonsense.
We know that there is no such thing
as a universal policy tool.
The fate of truth commissions
in the transitional justice world
is from a standpoint a very good example
of isomorphic mimicry.
We have to be much more flexible
and much more attuned to
the underlying questions
that we are trying to resolve,
how best to satisfy rights to
truth, justice and reparations
rather than how best to
establish a truth commission.
It may turn out that there are many places
in which a truth commission
is not the best vehicle
for the promotion of the
right to truth of victims.
But despite ourselves
and despite our claims
that we do not have a
cookie cutter approach,
my experience is that we do
have a cookie cutter approach.
And that is something
that we need to overcome.
And finally I think that
transitional justice
has become technocratic.
It has over-relied on
solutions that are basically
a question of clever
institutional engineering.
And the problem that transitional justice
is trying to resolve
is not simply a question
of institutional design.
So here to finish, I would like to recall
the old sociological conviction
that sustainable social transformation
requires changes at the
level of institutions
but also of culture and
of personal dispositions.
Transitional justice will be nothing more
than a series of more or less isolated
and more or less inconsequential events
without social economic transformations,
but also without success in recovering
a much stronger normative
leverage that it used to have.
Its instruments in general
are very well suited for this purpose.
More work on civil society, for example.
These days, despite evidence
about the wrongheadedness
of these, still reduced
largely to NGOs, is crucial,
for civil society has always played
a crucial indispensable
role in transitions,
well beyond the role assigned to it
in terms of monitoring,
advocacy and reporting.
For me, the future of the past depends
to a large extent on our ability
to reoccupy a much more
explicitly normative space
where normativity is not reduced
to either preaching or legalism.
This also would include
paying more attentions
to the levers of cultural transformations
and the wellsprings of social
solidarity and tolerance.
This normative space, by the way,
in many ways is also the space
of guarantees of
non-recurrence, of prevention,
of which I have said little today
despite the fact that this was the topic
to which I devoted most attention
during my time as Special Rapporteur,
also working with A-da-ma-dien.
I did so on the conviction
that this is the pillar of the mandate
that if not from the
standpoint of practice,
certainly from the standpoint of doctrine,
is the least developed element
of transitional justice.
Second, that it is here
much more than anywhere else
that the transformative
potential of transitional justice
can be realized despite the fact
that the discussions of prevention
are also affected by
technocratic reductionisms
that need to be overcome.
Third, that success at
prevention is crucial
for the sort of violations
that transitional justice deals with,
strictly speaking, can
never be fully redressed.
And finally, and I think
that this is crucial,
that the sort of principled pragmatism
that I take to have been
the underlying motivational
transitional justice
can make an important contribution
to restoring human rights
discourse and practice today.
The human rights community,
of which I take myself a part, of course,
has contributed to allowing the discourse
to become much more a tool of criticism
than of protection,
a blow horn rather than a
problem-solving strategy.
Taking prevention seriously would involve
setting aside the sort of utopianism
that we, the human rights community,
fall prey to so easily,
utopianism that concentrates
on describing desirable end states
and on pointing how far away we are
from attaining those end states,
but that disengages completely
from the task of providing answers
to the question of how to
get from here to there.
The future of dealing
with the past evolves,
as far as I am concerned,
not the ritualistic
sacralization of the past
but very deep reflection
about the many ways
in which even an examined past,
but particularly a problematic
and unredressed past,
continues to manifest itself
both in the present and in the future.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
(Pablo speaks off-microphone)
- Thank you very much, Pablo.
As always, inspiring.
I took lots of notes.
But it is now the time for our audience
to finally put questions.
I'm sure that there are many.
So I have the role to make sure
that as many of you as
possible have the chance
to put forward your queries.
Just a note on the side,
we are also collecting
questions on Twitter.
And there is a team behind the scenes
that are collecting those
and will. (chuckles)
We won't wall short of questions.
But please, the floor
is with the audience.
Okay, I'll take a couple of questions,
possibly from the three sides,
and then we'll ask Pablo to, please.
The lady, yeah.
- [Woman] Thank you very
much, Professor de Greiff,
for a fantastic lecture.
I was inspired by the title of it.
I have a question which
relates to the present
of human rights law
but also a little bit to the future.
Currently we more and more involved
in dealing with complicated issues
of accountability of non-state actors.
And my question is, to what extent
as a matter of future of
the transitional justice
also to find certain mechanisms
to deal with these massive
human rights abuses
made by non-state actors,
both territorially and extraterritorially?
Thank you very much again.
(woman speaks off-microphone)
- I saw one, no, here then.
Yes?
Yeah.
- Hi, so I work with--
- Yes, thank you.
- [Woman] I work with a
Tamil diaspora organization
from Sri Lanka, of course,
that would be particularly
relevant to your work,
having been at the forefront or involved
at the most important moment
when transitional justice was
starting to be established.
And now that Sri Lanka's up
for review again on the 20th,
the Commissioner of Human Rights
is giving her report on the 8th
and everything that's transpired
over the past 10 years,
especially the past week.
And I'll set that aside
since we're short on time.
Basically my question
is, given what I think
is fair to say failures of Sri Lanka
to carry out or to deliver
on their commitments
and the two resolutions,
what do you think it'll
take for the Council
to take the next step
and really give thought
or actually go forward with establishing
an international justice mechanism
or even referring Sri Lanka to the ICC
as the International
Commissioner Dauris recommended
as one part of the possibilities?
- Okay, here, perfect.
- Thanks.
(man whispers off-microphone)
Thank you so much for a
really, really inspiring talk.
For the last 25 years I've
been working in South Africa
on economic reconstruction
in the context of addressing
transitional justice issues.
And I wondered if
perhaps you would be able
to distinguish between
two characterizations
of economic attempts at solutions,
one which sounded to me like addressing
the actual, some of the
root causes of conflict
and the other which sounded
like throwing money at a problem.
Perhaps you could help us untangle those.
Thank you.
- Can we take a break,
and Pablo will come back
in a few more moments?
I'll give him the chance to.
- I will try to be short.
I have the really bad tendency
of giving long answers.
But I will try to (chuckles) moderate it
by surely not doing full
justice to the problems.
And let me take them in reverse order.
I think that there is a
fundamental distinction
between economic development
programs writ large
and the reparations programs on the other.
That reparations programs
are not simply akin
to, for example, crime insurance teams,
they of course involve an
acknowledgement of responsibility
and that they distribute
goods as a consequence
that people deserve not
in virtue of the fact
that they are citizens, like
for example basic services,
but in virtue of the fact that
their rights were violated.
Now, the previous government
in Sri Lanka, for example,
tried and very explicitly saying it,
people are not interested in reparations,
they are interested in development.
This has been tried in
many countries before
and it never works.
People are interested in reparations.
Not exclusively, not as
the only form of justice.
But it is one of the
manifestations of redress
that I think many people
express an interest in
and that they deserve
as a matter of right.
So I think that there is a distinction
between those two.
This is not, of course, an argument
against economic reconstruction.
I have always been very keen
on the idea of policy coordination.
I have always been, generally speaking,
for both theoretical and practical reasons
not so keen on policy centralization.
So I think that it makes perfect sense
to coordinate reparations policies
with development programs,
but that if a country wants, for instance,
to redress economic imbalances,
redistribute funds on behalf
of the least advantaged.
A reparations program is never
the best vehicle for doing those.
So countries are serious
about development,
they ought to use the tools
that are designed and proven
to achieve developmental goals.
And the idea that this can be achieved
through transitional justice,
I think, is a fantasy.
There is no reparation
program anywhere in the world
that has had a sufficiently large budget
to make an impact in
the general distribution
of wealth in a country.
And therefore I think that
there is a fiction around it.
I am much more sympathetic
to the idea of saying
the limited tasks for which
transitional justice policies
have been designed,
let's make sure that every
promise that we make we deliver
rather than awaken expectations of victims
without having any sense
of whether we will be
able to satisfy those.
I think that there is a
peculiar form of cruelty
in awakening expectations
on the part of people
who have already suffered tremendously
without any sort of finalities
of whether we will be in a position
to satisfy the expectations
that we have awakened with them.
So policy coordination is great.
The expansion of the mandates
of transitional justice measures,
keeping in mind that they are all
generally politically
weak, underfunded, ad hoc,
and created on behalf of constituencies
that are neither politically powerful
nor politically popular,
I think that one has to be realistic.
This is the modesty that
I was trying to suggest
we in the transitional
justice field should display.
Now, this is, again, I realize
only the beginning of a fuller answer.
Your question about Sri Lanka
for me is also very important
because I ended up being
very committed to the case
and spending a great deal of time to it.
I think that there was in many ways
a fundamental mistake in establishing
a very, very broad division of labor
between those people who are discussing
the constitutional reform on the one hand
and people that were discussing
the transitional justice
agenda on the other.
That it first failed to recognize
that there were very important connections
between the two agendas.
As far as I am concerned in Sri Lanka,
it's going to be very, very difficult
to make a headway without, for example,
a very thorough reform of the
attorney general's office,
which in Sri Lanka, like in many countries
with a English heritage,
the attorney general has the dual function
of both advocacy of the
state and the prosecutor,
but in a context in
which the former function
overrides the latter completely.
But this is something
that requires a constitutional reform.
That in the long term, it is
going to be very difficult
for transitional justice in the country
to make headway without some
serious security sector reform,
which also requires a
constitutional reform.
And therefore it was a
mistake to separate them.
By the same token, I don't think
that a constitutional reform
that concentrated exclusively on issues
having to do with devolution
and therefore ignoring the
perfectly legitimate grievances
of the Tamil population,
not to speak also of other
minority populations,
was never going to be the full solution
to the constitutional
problem in Sri Lanka.
So there was a lot that
could have been done
in linking the two discussions.
Here I have to say the
international community
doesn't always play a very positive role.
There were countless meetings organized
with the support of the
international community
to discuss the constitutional reformation
without ever mentioning
transitional justice,
and equally, countless meetings
organized by the international community
to talk about transitional justice
without saying anything
about transitional justice.
Now the idea that the Human Rights Council
is going to be a sort of savior
that will create a special jurisdiction
to solve the problems
that in Sri Lanka it has
been impossible to solve
and with respect to which
popularity and support
has not increased at all,
I frankly think that this
is a bit of an illusion,
that there is a lot of work
that needs to be done still
within the country
and of course with the
international community,
but the hope that all the solutions
will come from the Council,
I think, is once again to set up people
for huge, huge disappointment.
And finally on the question of
the role of non-state actors,
I think that this is an
absolutely critical one.
I had a list of themes
when I was trying to choose the themes
for the thematic reports I had to present
to the Council and to
the General Assembly.
And this was one of them,
the role of non-state actors
in transitional justice.
It is one that touches
very close to my heart,
not because of the very, very large role
the non-state actors have played
in the conflict in Colombia
and have played in the
conflict in Colombia
for probably not the full length
of the conflict, but almost.
And one of the mistakes in thinking
that transitional justice
issues can be reduced
to the implementation of
what international law says
is that international law,
for example, on this issue,
is largely silent.
So there is a universe of work
that still needs to be done
at the normative level.
And the topic that you
mentioned is one of those.
- I have Miss Lewis, yes,
and then we have one
question from our tweets.
Miss Lewis, if Grace can give you the?
- [Miss Lewis] Would you
say that there is a need
of transitional justice in
the criminal justice system
of the United States,
where in the past 10 years a
certain percentage of prison
have become a public company
so that the more prisoners there are,
the more profitable it becomes,
so that 20% of the population
of the United States
are people of color, black and Latino,
but 60% of the inhabitants in prison
are blacks and Latino?
And aside from that, they
are working at $1 per hour
for companies that are making money.
So is there a need for
transitional justice
in that situation?
- Grace?
- [Man] With China playing
an increasingly central role
in international affairs and
the international system,
what do you think the implications are
of China having at least
so far in some ways
quote, unquote, successfully
suppressed the memory,
or the current realization of the memory,
of the 50 million or so people
who died as a result of Mao's policies?
- And then if I can read
you what we received,
how can we continue to move forward
and incorporate women into
as well as lead transitional
justice processes,
and what do you consider
the lessons learned?
- Thank you very much.
I will take them, this set,
in the order they were posed.
I think that there is something
that well-established
consolidated democracies can learn
from transitional justice experiences
and that there is some
use in the implementation
of transitional justice measures
for what is called historical injustices,
injustices in the long past.
However, I think that,
again, part of my worry
about the current state
of transitional justice
is that its promoters have tended to think
that the very, very same formula
will work equally well
regardless of circumstances.
The injustices that you are describing
are, of course, injustices
that deserve to be redressed.
And I am totally convinced
that this is a country
that has a long way to go
in reckoning with its own racist past.
Whether the proper
mechanism for doing that
is the mechanisms that we have learned
through transitional
justice experiences or not,
I actually have some reservations.
But the idea of the reckoning
is something about which I
have absolutely no doubt.
And I am talking both about
the historical injustices
in the deep past, which in
fact had not just consequences
that are manifested today
but had legal manifestations
that manifested themselves
until quite recently,
for example in terms of
redlining of real estate,
lending practices on parts of the bank,
et cetera, et cetera.
I am also talking about
very, very recent events
like, for example, at one point
Senator Leahy had
discussed the possibility
of establishing a commission of inquiry
to investigate the rendition programs
that the USA had promoted
and in which many European
countries participated.
The Open Society Institute, for example,
has a brilliant report on this issue.
I think that, had that
initiative been followed,
in the last election making
torture a campaign issue
would have been significantly
more difficult than it was.
So again, I take some solace from the fact
that at some point, a
reckoning is inevitable.
How that reckoning is done,
I think that we should
be much more flexible
in the way that we implement
and design measures,
taking into account
what has been learned in other countries.
Which is more or less the answer
that I would like to give
to you concerning China.
It may surprise you, it
certainly surprised me
every time that I experienced it.
There was not occasion in
which I presented a report
to the Human Rights Council
or the General Assembly
which usually included a small section
on the importance of history education,
because as I mentioned,
I think that we should not work
solely at the level of
institutional designs
but also at the level of culture
and personal dispositions.
There was no time in
which I made this argument
in either chamber
in which the Chinese delegation
did not ask for the floor
to express their emphatic
agreement with me
about the importance of history education.
(chuckles)
(audience chuckles)
And finally on the question
of women and gender,
I think that we have come a long way.
Look, in the first few truth commissions,
they were gender blind in
the worst possible sense, no?
Not that they protected equally
the interests and the
rights of men and women.
No one ever thought about the
rights and interests of women
in the first truth
commissions, for example.
But we have made huge
strides in that respect.
The Peruvian Truth and
Reconciliation Commission
was the first to include
a specialized gender unit
in order to mainstream in
the work of the commission
gender considerations.
The Moroccan Truth Commission,
one may be surprised,
the first meeting I had with
the plenary of that commission,
which incidentally had
16 men and one woman,
I asked them, "What are
your initial thoughts
"about how the commission
should address gender crimes?"
And one of the commissioners,
a man obviously, raised his hand and said,
"Monsieur de Greiff, we
are a Muslim country.
"We have no such problems here."
(audience laughs)
To which I said, "I am
not a Moroccan specialist,
"but if what you are telling me is true,
"this would make out of Morocco
"a total outlier in countries
"that have experienced
systematic human rights abuses."
That was the starting point.
The end point, however, was
an incredibly progressive
reparations program for women,
departing, for example,
from Shariah dictates
about inheritance and
distribution of funds to women,
taking very, very seriously the rights
not just of female victims
but of female family members
that deserved compensation.
So the point is, I am far from saying
that we have done everything that we can
in terms of the proper integration
of gender considerations
in transitional justice work,
but I think that we have come a long way
and that we need much more
than innovation right now
is better implementation
and much, much better outreach.
- Pablo, I take advantage of this position
to ask, you know, to lead
you towards the closing
of this wonderful session we had together.
Of the many things you said,
I took note of two that
spoke very loudly to me.
The first is the concept of determination.
You know, we honor the family
that has made contribution
for humanity here.
And in the work we do, we
witness that every day.
The determination of
a group of individuals
that take upon itself the defense
and the advance of justice
for all those that suffered.
And South Africa was
mentioned, for example.
We have seen only a couple of weeks ago
a formal recognition
from state authorities
that prosecution was blocked purposely,
even though South Africa represents
what we consider a
successful transition, right?
At least to a certain extent.
So this concept of determination
that goes hand in hand
with the other thing
that really struck me of your lecture,
when addressing the past becomes possible,
when the violations and the
legacies becomes unbearable.
Now we are in a time when,
can we really say that
violations are unbearable?
How can we make their weight
and their effect felt by all?
How can we make sure that
there is a critical mass
of individuals that stand
up and start fighting
with those few that show
this great determination?
- Thank you, Anna (mumbles).
I wish that I had the recipe, of course.
But let me make the following comment.
I mentioned in my brief intervention,
perhaps too critically, that
I am very, very interested
in the relationship between institutions,
culture and the individual dispositions.
I take the history of Latin American
constitutionalism for example,
constitutions that were formally perfect.
There is the story of Victor
Hugo, the French author,
being shown a draft of the
Colombian 1886 constitution.
He's reading them and
coming back and saying,
"This is the constitution
of a republic of angels."
Now, knowing something
about Colombian history,
you will see the deep dissonance
between the formal perfection of the text
and the reality that it
actually failed to norm,
to regulate for so long.
So the history of Latin
American constitution
or constitutionalism for
me is the long history
of the struggle to establish closer links
between the formal texts
and a cultural and individual reality
that needed to go hand in hand
with the institutional design.
I think that the period
that we are living through
is a very interesting test
case for that precisely.
If one thinks, for example,
about the situation in the United States,
it is not that the
institutions have changed,
at least formally.
There has been no constitutional
reform in this country.
What has apparently happened was
that there is a cultural shift going on,
to some extent a shift
in personal dispositions
away from tolerance and solidarity.
And then the question is
how to make sure that once
again we establish a minimum,
a sustainable relationship
between those three spheres.
I know no transitional
process that has worked,
except for the demand of civil society.
I have never met a country, a government,
that has spontaneously said, "Great.
"Now we are going to do the
right thing" spontaneously.
No. Governments are brought there.
They do not get there
by their own volition.
And therefore the
question for me today is,
what can be done in order
to strengthen civil society?
And I think that there are several things
to be said about this.
The model of NGOs.
We have reduced a civil society to NGOs.
That is a developmental model
that I think is finding its limits.
We no longer have powerful
trade unions, for example,
which in every transition that I know of
have played an absolutely
indispensable role.
This is true not just
of the old transitions
in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
This is true of the recent
transitions in Tunisia.
The Tunisian labor union started
the work for the transition
long before the revolution started.
We no longer have religious organizations
that get involved significantly
in transitional issues
although, again, in most transitions,
including the critical ones in Poland
and the Central and
Eastern European countries,
Solidarity was both a labor movement
and a religious organization.
So the first thing that
we, I think, need to do
is to recover our richer
sense of civil society.
And we need to spend much more time
thinking about how to strengthen that.
Now, I of course recognize
both the theoretical
and the practical reasons
why civil society,
in being by its very nature
independent of the state,
it does not respond to policy making
as if it were a part of the state.
But beyond repealing the laws
that limit the operation of civil society,
there is a lot that we can do.
And I think that's it's a huge failure
of imagination on our part
not to do more of that.
I'm going to use some term
that is totally foreign
to my academic background,
but that I think that
is apt in this context.
Civil society should be,
and traditionally was,
a sort of ecosystem.
It included organizations of
very, very different kinds.
Civil society today is NGOs.
That doesn't work.
We need much more than that.
And I think that a
comprehensive prevention policy,
and this is something that
I had the benefit of working
when the Council asked
me to work with Adama
on transitional justice and prevention,
things like education,
promoting the role of religious leaders,
a memorialization activities,
and the promotion of culture writ large.
Cultural interventions, I think,
will eventually be critical
in order to recover sources
of solidarity and tolerance
and at the same time, empower
the demands for justice
without which the future of the past
is really, really grim.
- Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
