childrens rights

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann publishes “Child-Taking Justice and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative” in the American Journal of International Law

“Child-Taking Justice and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative,” an article by University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, has just been published in the American Journal of International Law.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law. During her current research-intensive semester, she is a Visiting Academic at University College London Faculty of Laws.

This new publication continues scholarly research that Amann first explored in her article “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024), and that she has presented at many universities and other learned societies in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Here’s an abstract for the new work:

The focus of this article is the 2022–2024 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative undertaken the U.S. Executive Branch. The article chronicles this three-year process, which included sessions with survivors and their descendants, and which resulted in a two-volume report, in an apology by President Joe Biden, and in designation of a national memorial at one of the most notorious school sites. This article examines the initiative as an example of “child-taking justice”; that is, as a process of what is called “transitional justice”, done in an effort to redress the takings of children from their community, followed by efforts to alter, erase, or remake the children’s identities. The initiative shed glaring light on the past history and present effects of a centuries-old practice by which the United States took Indigenous children from their families and forced them to attend residential schools where they were compelled to submit to Westernized and Christianized notions of “civilization.”

Unfolding within the internal constitutional framework of the United States, the U.S. initiative benefited from meaningful engagement with affected communities. This article nonetheless argues for a framing that also addresses external frameworks; to be specific, one that engages fully with applicable international law and lessons learned elsewhere. The argument runs counter to the United States’ longstanding practice of holding international human rights law at arm’s length, while pressing other countries to conform to that law’s strictures. Efforts of a U.S. human-rights-at-home movement have not reversed that trend. Thus the U.S. initiative made only a hesitant overture to international issues and to three countries, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which it claimed kinship. The 2025 inauguration of a President hostile to rights-based justice pointed to limitations of this approach.

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann presents on child-taking and Nuremberg-era witnesses in workshops at University of Oxford

University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann closed out her Fall 2024 research visit at the University of Oxford, where she was a Research Visitor at the Oxford Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College Oxford, by giving two presentations at Oxford. She:

Lectured on “Women Bearing Witness in the Nuremberg Trials Project” in the Oxford Faculty of Law Public International Law Discussion Group. Tsvetelina van Benthem, Research Officer at the Blavatnik School of Government, moderated. Amann’s talk, which was delivered at All Souls College and live online, concluded the Group’s Michaelmas Term series.

Presented her work in progress, “Child-Taking Justice and Forced Residential Schooling of Indigenous Peoples,” as part of the Bonavero Perspectives workshop series at the Oxford Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Moderating was another Bonavero Research Visitor, Professor Eva Marie Belser of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law, where she teaches Public International Law, Constitutional Law, and various upper-division courses exploring interrelations between national and international legal frameworks.

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann’s remarks on ICC arrest warrants against Russian officials published in ASIL Annual Meeting proceedings

Remarks which University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann delivered at a plenary panel of the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting have just been published.

Entitled “Children and the ICC Arrest Warrant Against the President and the Children’s Rights Commissioner of Russia,” Amann’s remarks form part of the chapter entitled “Late-Breaking Panel: ICC Arrest Warrants: Impunity in Check?” in 117 American Society of International Law Proceedings 328 (American Society of International Law, 2024).

Amann discussed the significance of the warrants, which had charged Russia’s President and another Presidential official of the war crimes of child deportation, and which were issued just days before the 2023 Annual Meeting. The remarks spurred her to further research on the topic, resulting in her article “Child-Taking,” also published this month, at 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024) (prior post).

Also on the panel were: Professor Saira Mohamed, University of California-Berkeley School of Law; Professor Javier S. Eskauriatza, University of Nottingham Scholl of Law; and Professor Marko Milanović, University of Reading School of Law. Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, moderated. The panelists’ remarks in full are here.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law. She served from 2012 to 2021 as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict. This Fall 2024 semester she is at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, serving as a Research Visitor at the Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and as a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College.