11 November 2011. Long Reads brings to Groundviews long-form journalism found in publications such as Foreign Policy, The New Yorker and the New York Times . This article was cited and quoted by the Tamil National Alliance, in its critique of the LLRC report, in Jan 2012. The power and promise of national exercises like the LLRC lies in the way that they can access the voices of those who have not traditionally been heard, and use them to build a more  inclusive collective memory. Yet for Sri Lanka’s Tamil women, the LLRC simply reaffirms bad old habits, writes Jo Baker In the lead up to the release of the report by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), strong concerns have been publicly raised about the value of a process that aims to build a clear picture of the conflict, without fully including ... Read the full article

Study on Gender and Sri Lanka's Commissions of Inquiry to be published by the LST Review. Abstract: Truth-telling mechanisms have consistently been shown to take on and perpetuate the gender-biases of their contexts. By exploring the scope of State-led and condoned discrimination towards Sri Lanka’s largest group of war-affected survivors, Tamil women in the North and East of the country, this paper aims to highlight the need for gender-sensitive truth commissioning following the conflict, and to assess key legal and practical obstacles to achieving this according to the international legal framework on non-discrimination. Drawing on critiques of Sri Lanka’s past and current Commissions of Inquiry, and on best practice, it then briefly proposes ways to place Tamil women more centrally, and therefore legally, within the transitional narrative. This paper was prepared as part of an MA degree in Human Rights Law at ... Read the full article

Respect and Protect? Exploring the need for the United Nations Human Rights Council to strengthen its response to reprisals This study will be joint-published as a policy paper later this year with the International Service for Human Rights, and was written thanks to input from a wide range of human rights practitioners working with and at the UN Human Rights Council. It falls among an expanding body of concern on the subject of reprisals against human rights defenders who cooperate with its key mechanisms. In addressing the reliance of Council mechanisms – and indeed the UN’s overarching objectives – on private actors and intermediaries, I contend that it cannot effectively fulfill its mandate without better protecting such persons – and being seen to be doing so. I first look at the nature of the relationship between Council and cooperator, ... Read the full article

Jo presented research at the 16th UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva at the side event, ‘Evolution of the recent debate on defamation of religions‘, on behalf of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and the SOAS Human Rights Law Clinic.  The study charts the development of discourse on religious defamation at the United Nations, and analyses blasphemy cases in Pakistan, Syria and Algeria using the international human rights legal framework.  It has been published by the Social Science Research Network (available to download here in full), and was well used by NGOs and delegates at the Session in the lead up to a groundbreaking draft resolution that better preserved the right to free expression. Also on the panel were the Director of the Human Rights Treaties Division at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ibrahim Salama ; Pakistan MP, ... Read the full article