Accounting for Gender-Based Crimes Against Women and Girls in International Law: Expert Perspectives on New Frontiers in Law and Practice

Join the Minnesota Journal of International Law and the Human Rights Center for a series of conversations on the challenges and prospects of addressing gender-based crimes through international law. The varied sessions will explore different aspects of current debates in international law with experts leading the way, including in the areas of corporate accountability, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) addendum, obstetric violence, and gender apartheid.

Schedule

7:45 am 
Registration open, coffee available

8:00-9:15 am
Gender-based crimes in conflict 
Speakers: Inna Liniova and Lina Fattom
Moderator: Amanda Lyons '09, Executive Director, Human Rights Center

9:15 - 9:30 am
Registration open
Light breakfast available

9:30-9:45 am
Opening Remarks
Speaker: Christopher Roberts, Faculty Advisor for Minnesota Journal of International Law

9:45-10:45 am 
Women, Peace, and Security Agenda
Speakers: Rangita de Silva de Alwis in conversation with Colleen Bell
Moderator: Megan Marvin '26, Minnesota Journal of International Law Symposium Editor 

10:45-11:00 am
Coffee break

11:00 am-12:00 pm
Beyond Sexual Violence: Obstetric and Reproductive Harms
Speakers: Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Anthony Ghaly
Moderator: Christopher Roberts, Faculty Advisor for Minnesota Journal of International Law

12:00-12:15 pm
Lunch

12:15-1:15 pm
Gender Apartheid
Speakers: Karima Bennoune and Alyssa Yamamoto
Moderator: Jennie Green, Clinical Professor of Law
 

Meet the Speakers

Professor Colleen Bell is an Associate Professor at the College of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan. She is an international relations scholar specializing in decolonial and feminist theorizations of war, security, and interventionism. She authored The Freedom of Security: Governing Canada in the Age of Counterterrorism (UBC Press) and co-editor of War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention (with Jan Bachmann and Caroline Holmqvist). Her recent work focuses on feminist foreign policy, the global making of Canadian police, and sexual exploitation in UN police peacekeeping.  She is the past president of the International Studies Association-Canada section and the current editor of Critical Studies on Security

Professor Karima Bennoune is the Lewis M. Simes Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She served as the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights from 2015-2021. Bennoune was also appointed as an expert for the International Criminal Court in 2017 during the reparations phase of the groundbreaking case The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, concerning intentional destruction of cultural heritage sites by extremists in Mali.  A former legal advisor for Amnesty International, she has carried out human rights missions in most regions of the world.  She has been on three missions to Afghanistan, visiting different regions of the country: in 1995, 2005 and 2011, and has worked closely with Afghan women human rights defenders for many years, including during the 2021 evacuations.  Karima is the author of “The International Obligation to Counter Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” which appeared in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in December 2022 and has been translated into Farsi by the Afghanistan Institute for Strategic Studies.  In September 2023, she spoke in the UN Security Council about gender apartheid in Afghanistan.  Subsequently, she travelled to South Africa with Malala Yousafzai to take part in a panel on gender apartheid with the Nobel laureate after her December 2023 Nelson Mandela lecture.  She is currently the Vice President of the American Society of International Law.

Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Global Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is a globally recognized international women’s rights expert and a member of the treaty body to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), where she is Chair of the Working Group on Individual Petitions Mechanism under the Optional Protocol and the Women, Peace and Security Co-Chair. In 2025, marking the 25 th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, she authored the Addendum to the CEDAW’s GR 30 on a new international normative framework on peace and security. She is also on the high- level advisory board of the President of the UN General Assembly and Vice Chair of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, which is headed by Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws, KC.

Lina Fattom is a Palestinian human rights lawyer who trained in the U.S. and specializes in public and private international law and corporate litigation, as well as cross-border arbitration and negotiations. She recently served as director of the Innovative Private Sector Development Project, formerly served as a legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, and previously worked as a human rights attorney with Amnesty International, an advisor with Al-Haq to the Norwegian Refugee Council and Oxfam, and manager of the Diaconia IHL Center in Jerusalem. She currently serves as a director on the board of PALTEL and directs projects to develop enterprises in Gaza and the West Bank.

Anthony Ghaly is a PhD Student of Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a JD from Berkeley Law, where he was a submissions editor for the Berkeley Journal of International Law, Human Rights Center fellow, Miller fellow, and recipient of the Clinical Legal Education Association Outstanding Clinical Student award for his work in the International Human Rights Law Clinic. He has also held legal internships at WITNESS and the International Federation for Human Rights. Prior to law school, Anthony received his BA from the Honors College of Rutgers University-Newark, where he graduated summa cum laude with a double-major in Political Science and Psychology and a minor in Economics.  Anthony’s research interests lie at the intersection of international criminal law and emerging technologies, including issues related to conflict-related sexual violence, reproductive harms, digital open-source investigations, and the emergence and commission of genocide. He is currently a researcher in the Investigations program at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

Inna Liniova is the Director of the Human Rights Institute of the Ukrainian Bar Association. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the Ukrainian Bar Association and held senior management roles in international technical assistance projects funded by USAID, the Council of Europe, and the European Union, supporting justice sector reform in Ukraine. She is a Ukrainian lawyer with expertise in transitional justice, human rights, and the rule of law, and holds a specialized degree from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a University Regents Professor; holder of the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society; and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is concurrently a professor of law at the Queen's University of  Belfast, School of Law. In 2017, Professor Ní Aoláin was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. In this capacity she worked closely with states and United Nations entities to advance human rights protections in some of the most difficult contexts globally. She was re-elected by States for a further three-year term in 2020, and her term ended in November 2023.  She was elected to the International Commission of Jurists in 2023. In 2024, Professor Ní Aoláin  was appointed Honorary King's Counsel (KC Hon) by His Majesty The King of England.  This is a life-time appointment. She is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann scholarship, a European Commission award, the Lawlor fellowship, and was a Leverhulme Senior Fellow. Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, human rights law, national security law, transitional justice, and feminist legal theory.

Professor Christopher Roberts is an associate professor of law and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Sociology and the University of Minnesota. He brings an interdisciplinary law, sociology, and public policy perspective to human rights, international law, and legal history. Roberts holds a JD from the University of Southern California and a PhD in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan, where he received the Distinguished Dissertation Award. He was a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in 2008-10. Professor Roberts’ research interests include human rights, citizenship, tort law, international law, legal history, legal and social theory, law and society, and the process of legal concept formation.

Alyssa Yamamoto is an international human rights lawyer, currently serving as the senior legal and policy advisor at the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project, a think tank initiative that works on prevention and accountability efforts for atrocity crimes and gross human rights violations. Yamamoto is also a legal advisor with the End Gender Apartheid Campaign, a global campaign to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity. Yamamoto previously served as a legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism and as an attorney at an international law firm, where she specialized in public international law and international dispute resolution. Yamamoto received a JD from Yale Law School and AB from Harvard College. She is a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Center at University of Minnesota Law School, and was formerly a fellow at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She has published on, among other issues, state responsibility and modes of liability under international law.