Dr Bríd Ní Ghráinne, Associate Professor with the School of Law and Criminology will coordinate the Dublin International Law Seminar on the 13th of May, taking place in The National University of Ireland 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, 12 - 2pm. Hosting Dr. Paul Morrow, University College Dublin (Visiting Research Fellow) who will present, 'Seeing Atrocities: Visualizing Mass Violence in International Criminal Law'. Supported by the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University.
Dublin International Law Seminar Speaker Information
Talk Title: Seeing Atrocities: Visualizing Mass Violence in International Criminal Law
Speaker: Dr. Paul Morrow
Affiliation: University College Dublin (Visiting Research Fellow)
RSVP here
Brief Description:
In the 21st century, it is impossible to avoid seeing atrocities. Pictures of grievous death populate the pages of newspapers and aggregators almost daily. Billboards and banner ads for humanitarian organizations routinely feature scenes of famine and forced displacement. On social media, our closest friends and relatives have become sources of encounters with intolerable harms.
This talk will explain what legal actors stand to gain from such encounters, and provide tools for navigating them. Examples of visual evidence employed at the International Criminal Court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and other domestic and international tribunals will illustrate the ways that images convey information about causation and culpability for atrocities. Emerging protocols for open source investigations and digitally derived evidence will be compared to older principles of legal interpretation of photographs, films, maps, and eyewitness drawings. The talk will conclude by proposing a number of practical guidelines for legal actors working with images of mass violence.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Paul Morrow is a visiting research fellow in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. His monograph Seeing Atrocities: Ethics for Visual Encounters with Intolerable Harms will be published by Oxford University Press this summer. In 2024 he edited a special issue of Genocide Studies and Prevention on “Limits of Legal Responses to Genocide.”
