Dr Dimitrios Kagiaros (Edinburgh Law School) reports on a recent workshop, ‘Specifying and Securing a Social Minimum’, held at the International Institute for the Sociology…
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Dagmar Topf Aguiar de Medeiros is reading for a PhD in Law at the University of Edinburgh, and is an intern at UN House Scotland.…
Comments closedThe Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) recently hosted a workshop on “Thomas Hobbes and Peace”. The event brought together political theorists,…
Comments closedDr Callum McGregor (Lecturer in Education, University of Edinburgh) reports and reflects on a recent Edinburgh lecture on digital citizenship and digital education, funded by the…
Comments closedThe Global Justice Academy (GJA) and Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP) recently hosted a free Peace Photography Masterclass at the University of Edinburgh. The workshop…
Comments closedThis blog post was written by Heather Milligan, Communications Intern for the Global Justice Academy. The blog reports on a recent seminar event hosted by the…
Comments closedDr. Leila Sinclair-Bright is a Career Development Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. In this article, she reflects on the notion of ‘the…
Comments closedDr Hugh McDonnell is based in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh as a Postdoctoral Fellow on a project assessing complicity in…
Comments closedThe Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory organised an author-meets-critics workshop on the manuscript of the book Just Justice by Frederick Wilmot-Smith. This workshop was funded…
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Publicising Human Rights violations and holding perpetrators of torture accountable has been guiding practice for much human rights work. As Prof. Tobias Kelly shows in this contribution to the GJA’s Peace & Conflict blog series: rather than shining light into dark places, many victims want the lights switched off. Kelly suggests that that the need for protecting victims may be more important than the need to hold perpetrators accountable.
By Tobias Kelly
Perpetrators need to be held to account and victims need redress. This has been the central principle of human rights work against torture for the past fifty years. However, collaborative work we have been carrying out in Kenya, Bangladesh and Nepal suggests that for many survivors- especially amongst the poorest and most vulnerable in society- the emphasis might be in the wrong place. What most survivors want, above all else, is to feel safe and secure, and accountability has only an indirect relationship with the desire for protection.
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