This program was recorded on October 30, 2024. Watch the recording here or on our YouTube channel.

The term mass grave lacks a universally accepted legal definition in international law. However, various legal instruments under international humanitarian law, including Additional Protocol I, aim to promote the protection of mass graves and ensure the dignity of the deceased.

As participants will recall, the first webinar in this series focused on context-specific issues and broad challenges related to mass graves, highlighting how human rights leaders and lawyers in affected communities have responded to these situations. The second webinar now focuses on principles, protocols, and international law, assessing how these protocols and guidelines work, how determinations are made, and what more needs to be done to protect the dignity of the dead.

This program, which looked into the technical aspects of mass graves from a legal and forensic point of view, was co-sponsored by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

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SPEAKERS:

Katelyn Bolhofner is an Assistant Professor of Forensic Anthropology in the School of Interdisciplinary Forensics (SIF) and Director of the Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Laboratory (FAABL), ASU. Dr. Bolhofner is a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. Her research in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology links skeletal biology to issues of social identity, health, and human interactions in historical and archaeological contexts, as well as in contemporary society. Currently, she is the PI of an NIJ-funded multi-year, multi-agency interdisciplinary project seeking to employ skeletal trauma analysis to improve diagnostic criteria that will address and curb the rising trend of physical elder abuse. Dr. Bolhofner’s work has been published in leading journals, presented nationally and internationally at major conferences, and is funded by multiple grants from the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Dr Melanie Klinkner is an international law scholar and, together with Dr Ellie Smith, author of the Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection and Investigation. Since October 2023 she is working on an 5 year-long, £1.6 million project to develop a comprehensive human rights framework for Mass Grave Protection, Investigation and Engagement (MaGPIE). She led an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leaders Fellowship for the creation of mass grave protection guidelines with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) as project partner. In addition, she was the Principal Investigator on a Global Challenges Research Fund project on how to humanise the process of mass grave protection and investigation from the representative perspective of victims’ families. She also led a Leverhulme funded project to explore the merit of open source mass grave mapping. Together with Dr Howard Davis she is author of the monograph ‘The Right to the Truth in International Law’ (published by Routledge, 2020). During Trinity Term 2018 she was a Research Visitor at Oxford University’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and since February 2021 a member of the ‘Panel of Experts on Missing Persons‘ for the ICMP. At Bournemouth University she teaches public international law, international criminal law and international human rights law.

Sarah Knuckey joined Columbia Law School in July 2014 as faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute, director of the Human Rights Clinic, and the Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Law. Knuckey is an international human rights lawyer, professor, and special adviser to the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. She has carried out fact-finding investigations and reported on human rights and armed conflict violations around the world, including in Afghanistan, Brazil, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. Her research and advocacy focus on issues such as unlawful killings, sexual violence, and corporate accountability. Knuckey is a founding editor of Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy. She has been awarded the Fulbright Postgraduate Award, the Murphy Postgraduate Scholarship, the Harvard Human Rights Program Fellowship, the Parsons Memorial Prize for Law, and the KCF Keall Prize in Law.

The panel was moderated by Tim Franklin, Co-Chair of the International Criminal Law Committee.

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This program is the second installment of a two-part series on mass graves. You can view the first part, which was recorded August 7, 2024, here.