indigenous 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 working paper at International Law Colloquium

The University of Georgia School of Law’s spring 2025 International Law Colloquium welcomed Professor Diane Marie Amann, who presented her working paper, “Child-Taking Justice and Forced Residential Schooling of Indigenous Americans.”

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. Amann served as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict and is a member of the Bring Kids Back UA Task Force.

Her presentation drew upon her recently-published article, “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024). Esra Mirze Santesso, Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, as Amann’s faculty discussant. 

This year, Professor Desirée LeClercq is overseeing the colloquium, which is designed to introduce students to features of international economic law through engagement with scholars in the international legal field. To view the full list of International Law Colloquium speakers, visit our website.

This program is made possible through the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann presents on child-taking and Nuremberg-era witnesses at Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast law schools

University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann gave a series of public lectures in mid-November at Irish law schools.

While a Visiting Research Scholar at Trinity College Dublin School of Law, she:

The moderator for both events was Trinity Law Professor Michael A. Becker, who sponsored Professor Amann’s visit.

Professor Amann also presented “Child-Taking Justice and Forced Residential Schooling of Indigenous Peoples” at the Centre for Human Rights, Queen’s University Belfast School of 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. She has pursued a research-intensive semester this autumn, primarily as a Research Visitor at the Oxford Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College Oxford.

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann publishes “Child-Taking” in Michigan Journal of International Law

“Child-Taking,” an article by University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, has just been published at 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305-79 (2024).

As theorized in the article, “child-taking” occurs when a state or similar powerful entity takes a child and then endeavors to alter, erase, or remake the child’s identity. It is a criminal phenomenon that has been repeated across decades and centuries. On rare occasion, criminal prosecutions have occurred, as with the Situation in Ukraine before the International Criminal Court. More often redress, if any, must take place in other forums. The article thus considers these other types of transitional justice, with particular attention to the legacies of forced residential schooling imposed upon Indigenous children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.

Amann presented aspects of this research at numerous venues, including King’s College London, Yale University, the University of Cambridge, University College London, and the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting.

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.

Here’s the abstract of the “Child-Taking” article, the print version of which is available here:

A ruling group at times takes certain children out of their community and then tries to remake them in its image. It tries to rid the child of undesired differences, in ethnicity or nationality, religion or politics, race or ancestry, culture or class. There are too many examples: the colonialist residential schools that forced settler cultures on Indigenous children; the military juntas that kidnapped dissidents’ children; and today’s reports of abductions amid crises like that in Syria. Too often nothing is done, and the children are lost. But that may be changing, as the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) is seeking to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the war crimes of unlawfully deporting or transferring children from Ukraine to Russia.

“This article examines the criminal phenomenon that it names ‘child-taking.’ By its definition, the crime occurs when a state or similar powerful entity, first, takes a child, and second, endeavors, whether successfully or not, to alter, erase, or remake the child’s identity. Using the ICC case as a springboard, this article relies on historical and legal events to produce an original account of child-taking. Newly available trial transcripts help bring to life a bereft mother and five teenaged survivors, plus the lone woman defendant, who testified at a little-known child-kidnapping trial before a postwar Nuremberg tribunal. Their stories, viewed in the context of the evolution of international child law, inform this article’s definition. These sources further reveal child-taking to be what the law calls a matter of international concern. At its most serious, child-taking may constitute genocide or another crime within the ICC’s jurisdiction. Yet even if circumstances preclude punishment in that permanent criminal court, child-taking remains a grave offense warranting prosecution or other forms of local and global transitional justice. This is as true for the Indigenous children of residential schools in North America, Australia, and elsewhere, and for children in Syria and many other places in the world, as it is for the children of Ukraine.