African Perspectives on Tradition and Justice

Eva Brems joined the Ghent University Law Faculty in September 2000 as the first holder of the then newly created chair of Human Rights Law. Before that, she studied law at the universities of Namur (candidat 1989), Leuven (licenciaat 1992) and Harvard (LL.M 1995). She was a PhD researcher at the University of Leuven (1995-1999) and a lecturer at Maastricht University (1999-2000). At Ghent University, she founded the Human Rights Centre. Her research interests cover most areas of human rights law, in European and international law as well as in Belgian and comparative law, with a particular emphasis on the protection of the rights of non-dominant groups and individuals. She has a keen interest in multi- and interdisciplinary research. She has been an activist in the board of several Belgian human rights NGOs, including as the chair of the Flemish section Amnesty International (2006-2010), and she was briefly active in politics (as a member of the Belgian federal Chamber of Representatives, 2010-2014).

Giselle Corradi is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Human Rights Centre at the Law Faculty of Ghent University. She studied law in Buenos Aires before moving to Ghent, where she completed her Masters in Comparative Studies of Culture (2005) and her PhD in Law (2012). Her PhD research dealt with the role of international development actors regarding human rights and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa, with case studies in Sierra Leone and Mozambique.
Before joining the Human Rights Centre as a researcher in 2008, she worked as a consultant for fair trade projects in Guatemala and Peru for the Durabilis Foundation (2006-2007). In her current position as a researcher she combines her expertise in the domains of law, anthropology and development, with particular attention for gender.
She is also a board member of the Flemish Interuniversity Research Network on Law and Development Law&Dev and of the Commission of Legal Pluralism. She is also a member of the human rights component of the VLIR-UOS Institutional Cooperation Programme with Mozambique DESAFIO and she is editorial assistant for the “journal Human Rights and International Legal Discourse” (HRILD).

Martien Schotsmans holds a Masters in Law, a Masters in Criminology and a Post-Graduate in International Politics. She has worked as a private practice lawyer in Belgium for about ten years, mainly in criminal law. In the following years, she was in Rwanda with Avocats Sans Frontières to provide legal assistance to accused and victims of genocide in domestic trials, in Chad with FIDH to conduct investigations in the Hissène Habré case and in Sierra Leone with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After that she worked with Avocats Sans Frontières to organize legal assistance for defendants and victims of international crimes in domestic trials in the DRC and at the ICC. In between, Martien did consultancies on judicial reform, on GBV and transitional justice in Rwanda, DRC, Benin, Morocco, etc. More recently, she conducted research in the field of transitional justice in Sub-Saharan Africa and more in particular on the role of tradition-based justice. She worked until 2013 at the Leuvens Institute of Criminology at KU Leuven (Belgium) where she provides research support and teaching assistance. She is also preparing a PhD (since 2010) on the topic of “Globalisation and Localisation in Transitional Justice and the challenges for tradition-based justice”. Since 2013 she is director of RCN Justice & Démocratie.