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Launch Justice Visions podcast

Katharina Smets and Christian Cito Cirhigiri during the recording of the pilot episode



As part of the Justice Visions project, and with the support of the European Research Council, we are this month launching our own podcast series, to showcase groundbreaking research and innovative practices in the field of transitional justice.

The pilot episode highlighted the need to disseminate research about transitional justice in ongoing conflicts and democracies and to critically reflect on the interest in victim participation. “We really want to take a more dynamic approach to the scholarly knowledge that is often produced in the Global North, but uses experience and expertise from the Global South as source material, as it were. Publications are often not accessible to scholars and practitioners in the Global South because of prohibitively high fees”, explains Tine Destrooper, project coordinator and co-host of the podcast, “With this podcast, we want to make that pool of scholarly knowledge and expertise more widely accessible and enter into a dialogue with a multitude of actors”.

The podcast will feature conversations with scholars in the field of transitional justice, shedding a light on themes such as legal provisions for victim participation, the evolution of the field, victimization, universal jurisdiction, economic and social justice, narratives, the role of the arts, and ways to stir the judicial imagination. “We want to foreground victims’ and practitioners’ stories and perspectives, integrating these in the DNA of the podcast in order to foster a dynamic exchange”, adds Brigitte Herremans, researcher and co-host of the podcast, “Most importantly we want to connect with a global audience of academics, human rights activists and practitioners, by offering a platform to bridge research and practice and to translate scholarly insights to the realities of practitioners working in this field”.

The first episode of Justice Visions, which is available on Apple Music and Spotify, addresses the legal provisions for victim participation, discussing mechanisms and restrictions, and how these affect the avenues and modalities of victim participation. Stephan Parmentier, professor of criminal law and criminology at the University of Leuven, and Rudina Jasini, an attorney and researcher at Oxford University, are the two studio guests. Our colleague Sangheeta Yogendran, a former practitioner at the victim support section of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal testified about her experience in this tribunal which is often called an experimental laboratory.