LCIL Evening Lecture: 'The Common Sense of Anti-Impunity: Human Rights, Amnesties, and Sexual Violence in Conflict' by Karen Engle

Lecture Summary: In the 21st century, fighting impunity has become both the rallying cry and a metric of progress for international human rights advocacy and law. Whereas in an earlier era, criminal punishment was considered one tool among many, it has now become common sense that the absence of criminal sanction (“impunity”) is the principal harm to be addressed by human rights and that criminal sanction (“anti-impunity”) is the key means by which not only to respond to human rights violations, but to promote sustainable peace and foster justice.

This lecture traces the anti-impunity turn in human rights in two sites: 1) the rejection of amnesties for gross human rights violations, even when the amnesties are made a condition of peaceful transition; and 2) international criminal legal developments that treat rape and sexual violence as the quintessential harm that women suffer during conflict. These examples both highlight the common sense and offer reasons to be skeptical of it.

Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and founder and co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also an affiliated faculty member in Latin American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. She researches and writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and Latin American law. She is author of numerous scholarly articles and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights. She is co-editor of “Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and is finalizing a book manuscript entitled “The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: From Human Rights to Criminal Law.” Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bogotá in 2010. She was the 2016-17 Deborah Lunder and Alan Ezekowitz Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

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