Announcements

1.  The Essex Transitional Justice Network and the Essex Business and Human Rights Project announce Summer School 2014: Settling Accounts: The Role of Business in Societies Emerging from Conflict and Authoritarian Rule, to be held 18-21st September 2014 (University of Essex, Colchester campus).  Building on the strong expertise at Essex on transitional justice and corporate accountability, the ETJN, together with the Essex Business and Human Rights Project (EBHR), will be running its III Transitional Justice Summer School between 18 and 21 September 2014. The summer school will consider the role of businesses in societies emerging from conflict and authoritarian rule, including different issues of corporate accountability that might arise in these contexts and mechanisms to address it. Experts in both corporate accountability and transitional justice will be provided with a forum to discuss specific topics such as project lending; debt and financial complicity, as well as litigation and advocacy strategies. Teaching staff includes: Professor Sheldon Leader, director of the Essex Business and Human Rights Project; Professor Sabine Michalowski, editor of the only book on the subject: Corporate Accountability in the Context of Transitional Justice; Professor Karen Hulme expert on human rights and the environment and winner of the ASIL price for her book War Torn Environment: Interpreting the Legal Threshold; Charles Abrahams, senior director of Abrahams Kiewitz Incorporated, a South African boutique law firm specializing in class actions, public interest law, and litigation in the area of business and human rights; Anneke Van Woudenberg, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch and Richard Meeran and Daniel Leader, Partners at Leigh Day and with extensive litigation in cases involving corporations and countries in transition. Further details are available here. For more information, contact etjnfr03 {at} essex.ac(.)uk.

2.  Confidence Crisis in Human Rights: Implications for the UK. Middlesex University, London 30 June to 4 July 2014. This 5 day intensive course will explore the challenges faced by the human rights regime, resulting from the mistrust towards the system voiced by countries which, like the UK in Europe or Brazil in the Americas, once helped to create and embrace the human rights machinery. The course will explore the ideologies and geopolitical conditions resulting in this evolution through the prisms of controversial topics dominating intergovernmental human rights agendas in Europe and worldwide, in particular: the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion;  the consequence for human rights of austerity measures and migration policies; the role of the UN Security Council  in conflict zones; and the difficulty to accommodate within the human rights framework emerging topics such as  the impact of activities undertaken by corporations in relation to development projects, and the protection of the environment. Further details are available here.