Institute Fellow: Rights and Social Justice, Dr Lauren Dempster is the Lead of the Transitional Justice Cluster in the School of Law, and organises a series of events in conjunction with the Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Human Rights Centre.  On 4 March 2025 the Cluster welcomed three guests whose work focuses on issues of human rights and state violence.

Dr Sabrina Villenave delivered a lunchtime seminar on her research on enforced disappearances by police in present-day Brazil. Sabrina's book on this topic Disappearances and Police Killings in Contemporary Brazil: The Politics of Life and Death was published by Routledge in 2022.

Dr Shari Eppel delivered an evening lecture on her work finding, exhuming and identifying the remains of the disappeared of Matabeleland, Zimbabwe.  Shari is a clinical psychologist and forensic anthropologist whose visit to Belfast was funded by the AHSS Global Reputation Fund, kindly supported by the Mitchell Institute Deputy Director, Professor Louise Mallinder, and Institute Fellow: Rights and Social Justice, Professor Anna Bryson from the School of Law.

They were also joined by Rainer Huhle, co-founder of the Nuremberg Human Rights Centre, former Human Rights expert with the UN High Commissioner’s for Human Rights in its Colombia Office and former member of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

Sabrina, Shari and Rainer joined Transitional Justice Cluster members for an informal meeting to learn more about the research being conducted at Queen's.

Shari Eppel delivering her lecture, Bones in the Forest: Exhumation and Reburial in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe.