LAW5433 - Victims, law and mass atrocity - 2019

This unit focuses on the victims of mass atrocity. After assessing the meaning of victimization, the unit focuses on what justice means to victims, differentiating between retributive, expressive and restorative justice and exploring the tensions that may inhere between various communities of victims. It also provides detailed analysis of the variety of post-conflict accountability mechanisms: trials, truth commissions, civil proceedings, amnesty, customary dispute resolution, and reparations. It also covers the law and jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court, and other international tribunals, in terms of victim participation in criminal proceedings, victim reparations, and victim damage claims. In addition, it will include case studies and discussion of how disempowered groups become enmeshed as agents of violence during episodes of mass atrocity.

On completion of this unit students will be able to:

• Apply knowledge and understanding of recent developments in international criminal and human rights law with creativity and initiative to further learning in relation to victim's rights, accountability for atrocity, and criminological understandings of human agency in times of political violence with creativity and initiative to new situations in professional practice;
• Investigate, analyse and synthesise complex information, problems, concepts and theories in international criminal law and human rights law, in particular, with reference to feminist theory, ethnographic method, neuroscience, victimology, and other interdisciplinary perspectives;
• Conduct research into the complex statutory scheme based on knowledge of appropriate research principles and methods concerning the needs, conduct, goals, responsibilities, and ambitions of victims of human rights abuses so as to create new understandings of key developments, likely future directions and current and emerging problems, including the vastly underappreciated reality that, during episodes of massive political violence, victims may come to victimise others.
• Use cognitive, technical and creative skills to generate and evaluate at an abstract level complex ideas and concepts relevant to the study of victims of human rights abuses.

Research assignment (3,750 words): 50%

Take-home examination (3,750 words): 50%

24 contact hours per teaching period (either intensive, semi-intensive or semester long, depending on the Faculty resources, timetabling and requirements)