©Olivo: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau
Announcements On Wednesday, February 26, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the International Center for Transitional Justice hosted the 11th annual Emilio Mignone Lecture on Transitional Justice at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in midtown Manhattan. For this year’s lecture, Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia (2010-2018) and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, joined Liv Tørres, Pathfinders Director at the Center on International Cooperation at NYU, for a conversation on the role of transitional justice in peace negotiations.
President Santos reflected on the singular opportunity that peace negotiations can offer a society torn apart by conflict and grappling with mass atrocities for accountability, acknowledgment and redress for victims, and reforms. For those at the negotiating table, acknowledgement and accountability are often the most difficult and sensitive matters to address. But as the peace deal in Colombia has shown, they are essential for a society to successfully make the transition to a sustainable peace. At a time when brutal conflict rages around in the world, President Santos’s experiences leading peace negotiations could offer crucial lessons on how to apply transitional justice mechanisms to other post-conflict situations.
President Juan Manuel Santos served as Colombia’s head of state for two terms from 2010 to 2018, during which time he led peace negotiations with the guerilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and signed the landmark peace agreement in 2016 that ended the 50-yearlong civil war. That same year, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his resolute efforts to bring peace to his country.
This lecture series is named after human rights advocate Emilio Fermín Mignone, founder and director of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, and loving father of Monica Maria Candelaria Mignone, whom the Argentine military forcibly disappeared on May 14, 1976. The series honors Mignone’s lifelong commitment to human rights, accountability, and justice and his vital leadership in documenting disappearances and other grave human rights violations committed by Argentina’s security forces. Past speakers have included Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Sherrilyn Ifill, Darren Walker, José Zalaquett, Louise Arbour, and Aryeh Neier.
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