University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann discussed her research on child-taking at a side event occurring during the 24th annual Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court, held in early December at The Hague in The Netherlands.
In addition to Professor Amann, additional panelists included: Hala Turjman, Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic: Alla Perfetska, Voices of Children; and Ikhlass Ahmed Altaher Eisa, Strategic Initiatives for Women in the Horn of Africa. Ukraine’s Ambassador to The Netherlands, Andriy Kostin, provided opening and closing remarks, and Wayne Jordash KC, president of the Global Rights Compliance Foundation, moderated the panel.
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 an Affiliate Academic at University College London Faculty of Laws.
From 2012 to 2021 Amann served as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict. Her many publications on international child law include two that analyze the long-standing criminal phenomenon by which a state (or other powerful entity) takes a child and then endeavors to alter, erase or remake the child’s identity. These two articles are “Child-Taking Justice and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative,” 119 American Journal of International Law 629 (2025), and “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024).
Her talk opened “80 Years On: The Legacy of the Nuremberg Trials for Accountability,” a panel of experts convened to analyze the midtwentieth-century trials project. The panel also looked to contemporary developments in international relations and international criminal justice – not least, to the Nuremberg precedent which permitted international criminal prosecutions of heads of state and other governmental leaders. A full video of the panel can be found here.
Besides Professor Amann (pictured above left), panelists included (l to r): Dan Plesch, Professor of Diplomacy & Strategy at SOAS University of London; Christoph Safferling, Director of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy and Professor of Law at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; as moderator, International Criminal Court Judge Joanna Korner CMG KC; Kirsty Sutherland, international barrister at 9BR Chambers, London; and Sir Howard Morrison KCMG CBE KC, former Judge on the International Criminal Court. (LinkedIn photo credit)
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 an Affiliate Academic at University College London Faculty of Laws. She has published several essays on the Nuremberg era and is writing a book on lawyers and other women professionals at that first trial.
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.
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.
Amann, who 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, is a Visiting Academic this semester at University College London Faculty of Laws.
Her commentary on Prosecutor v. Bemba, a 2018 judgment of acquittal by the ICC Appeals Chamber, first appeared as “In Bemba, Command Responsibility Doctrine Ordered to Stand Down.” It then was included in this 2025 Brill Publishers collection, edited by UCLA Law Professor Richard H. Steinberg. Also contributing to the book’s section on the Bemba judgment were attorney Nadia Carine Fornel Poutou and law professors Miles Jackson (Oxford), Michael Newton (Vanderbilt), and Leila Nadya Sadat (Washington University).
“The acceptance of commander’s responsibility is, in effect, acceptance of authority over persons permitted to kill. With that acceptance comes a heavy burden, grown out of practical and moral concerns and reflected in longstanding legal doctrine. At odds with this burden was the judgment of acquittal that the International Criminal Court Appeals Chamber entered in Bemba in 2018. Originally appearing in an online forum, this commentary argues for a statutory construction that better would serve the purposes of the ICC and the command responsibility doctrine.”
The daylong conference will take place on Friday, November 7 in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall at the University of Georgia School of Law. CLE credit is available for both in-person and virtual attendance. Registration information can be found on the conference webpage.
Sponsoring along with GJICL, a student-edited journal established more than 50 years ago, is the law school’s Dean Rusk International Law Center. GJICL Editor in Chief, Casey Smith (J.D. ’26) and Executive Conference Editor Kellianne Elliot (J.D. ’26) worked Georgia Criminal Law Review Editor in Chief Kerolls Gadelrab (J.D. ’26); Professor Jason A. Cade, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law & Community Health Law Partnership Clinic Director; Center staff Sarah Quinn, Director; Catrina Martin, Global Practice Preparation Assistant; Taher S. Benany, Center Associate Director; and with the GJICL’s Faculty Advisor, Professor Desirée LeClercq, who is Assistant Professor of Law & Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center.
Below is the concept note of the conference:
Political and legal developments have precipitated a convergence of the fields of criminal law and immigration law. Now commonly referred to as crimmigration, this merger of previously distinct practice areas already has profoundly reshaped the legal and social terrain for migrants in the United States. While entry and removal decisions remain essentially administrative, enforcement practices and rhetoric increasingly embrace the punitive logic and carceral reach of the criminal legal system, but with fewer due process protections. As new legislation vastly expands detention authorization and other enforcement resources, it seems apparent that the rhetoric and mechanics of crimmigration will continue to dominate immigration policy in the United States for the foreseeable future.
This symposium, jointly sponsored by the Dean Rusk International Law Center, the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, and the Georgia Criminal Law Review, invites scholars, immigration attorneys and judges to engage with these developments. We hope panelists will collectively address a number of important questions, such as the following: How does the new crimmigration landscape impact immigrants and communities in the Southeast and beyond? What new burdens does it put on the judiciary, and what role do federal courts have today in determining and upholding constitutional and statutory protections for migrants? Does the durability and continued expansion of crimmigration pose new challenges for immigration and criminal law attorneys; and, if so, how are the immigration and criminal law bars responding to those challenges? As crimmigration tactics expand, what new legal threats face U.S. citizens, including family members, employers, and immigrant advocates? Does the crimmigration paradigm contend with or obscure the structural forces that drive migration, particularly from the global south? Are there reasons to hope or expect the emergence of alternatives to crimmigration as the governing paradigm for the regulation of immigrants in the United States?
These conversations will occur through three panels and a lunchtime keynote speaker.
The day’s events are as follows:
9:30am | Opening Remarks
Usha Rodrigues, Dean, University Professor & M.E. Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law
9:35am | Panel 1: Introduction to Crimmigration & the Current State of Affairs
Abel Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of Law, Wake Forest Law
Shalini Ray, Associate Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research, Alabama Law
Gracie Willis, Attorney, National Immigration Project
Moderator: Christian Turner, Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law
10:35am | Break
10:45am| Panel 2: The Impact of Crimmigration Policies on Communities and Advocates
Jessica Vosburgh, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights
Jenny R. Hernandez, Lead Senior Attorney at Immigration Defense Unit, City of Atlanta Office of the Public Defender
Carolina Antonini, Founding Partner, Antonini & Cohen Immigration Law
Moderator: Elizabeth Taxel, Clinical Associate Professor & Criminal Defense Practicum Director, University of Georgia School of Law
12:00pm | Keynote Introduction
Jason A. Cade, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law & Community Health Law Partnership Clinic Director, University of Georgia School of Law
12:05 Keynote Address
Judge Ana C. Reyes, United States District Court, District of Columbia
1:00pm | Panel 3: Challenging the Legality of Migration Controls & Envisioning Reform
Daniel I. Morales, Associate Professor of Law; Dwight Olds Chair, The University of Houston Law Center
Rebecca A. Sharpless, Associate Dean for Experiential Learning, Professor of Law, Director, Immigration Clinic, University of Miami School of Law
Emily Torstveit Ngara, Director of Clinical Programs, Associate Clinical Professor and Director, Immigration Clinic, Center for Access to Justice, Immigration Law Clinic, Georgia State University College of Law
Moderator: Jason A. Cade J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law & Community Health Law Partnership Clinic Director, University of Georgia School of Law
2:00 | Closing Remarks
Casey Smith, Editor in Chief, Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law
University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann recently gave an online lecture entitled “Justice for Child-Taking and Other Crimes against and affecting Children” as part of “International Criminal Law, Conflict Resolution and Transitional Justice,” the week-long 24th Specialization Course in International Criminal Law for Young Penalists, held in Sicily, at the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, Italy.
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. Her Siracusa lecture drew upon her expertise on children, violence, conflict, and justice. Her most recent publication in this field is “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024); all her related publications are available 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.
Here’s the abstract for Professor Amann’s article:
“Conventional narratives tend to represent the post-World War II international criminal proceedings as a men’s project, thus obscuring the many women who participated, as lawyers, journalists, analysts, interpreters, witnesses, and defendants. Indeed, two women stood trial before Nuremberg Military Tribunals. This article examines the case of the only woman found not-guilty: Inge Viermetz, who had been an administrator at Lebensborn, the Nazi SS adoption and placement agency. The article outlines the prosecution’s child-taking case against Viermetz, as well as her successful gendered self-portrayal as a conventionally feminine caregiver. With references to Professor Megan A. Fairlie, at whose memorial symposium it was presented, the article concludes by considering contemporary implications of this acquittal at Nuremberg.”
University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann recently took part in a New York conference that launched the Children and Crimes Against Humanity Coalition, formed to ensure that child justice is embedded in a treaty to be negotiated at the United Nations.
Professor Amann, who chaired a conference panel entitled “Increasing Visibility of Crimes Affecting Children and New Crimes Against Children,” commented on drafts and is an individual endorser of the Coalition white paper. Here at Georgia Law, she 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. She was Special Adviser to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict from 2012 to 2021, and has served since 2023 on the Bring Back Kids UA Task Force. Her recent publications in this field include “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024), and “International Child Law and the Settlement of Ukraine‑Russia and Other Conflicts,” 99 International Law Studies 559 (2022).
By U.N. General Assembly resolution, states will conclude the Crimes Against Humanity Treaty – known formally as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity – following diplomatic plenipotentiary conferences in 2028 and 2029. Preparatory meetings will take place in the interim, beginning next January.
The treaty’s text will derive from draft articles adopted in 2019 by the International Law Commission, and from amendments to those articles which U.N. member states may propose during the negotiation process.
Through efforts like the Columbia conference and the just-released white paper, the Children and Crimes Against Humanity Coalition will endeavor to promote states’ proposals to include in child-related provisions in the final treaty text. Its white paper proposes, inter alia: that every person under 18 be defined as a child; that the crime of persecution expressly include age as a prohibited ground; and the enumeration of acts that may constitute crimes against humanity explicitly include recruitment and use of children by armed groups and armed forces, as well as forced marriage. Further provisions relate to national justice and reparations proceedings; among these is the proposal that any child suspected of having committed a crime against humanity will be treated in a country’s child justice system, and not via an adult criminal prosecution.
The white paper’s authors are Véronique Aubert (Save the Children), Zoé Bertrand (Global Survivors Fund), Janine Morna (Amnesty International), and Zama Neff (Human Rights Watch). Those nongovernmental organizations co-sponsored the May 5 conference, along with various units of Columbia University and the U.N. permanent missions of Andorra, Brazil, Malta, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
University of Georgia School of Law alumna and Dean Rusk International Law Center Council member Tess Davis (J.D. ’09) was featured in the documentary “LOOT: A Story of Crime and Redemption,” which highlights the illicit art dealings of Western museums.
From remote Cambodian villages to elite art institutions in New York, LOOT : A Story of Crime & Redemption is a daring look into the underbelly of the multi-billion-dollar art market and the deadly reality behind “blood antiquities” filling Western museums today. During Cambodia’s civil war, British “adventurer-scholar” Douglas Latchford led an extensive criminal network, looting centuries-old temples hidden within landmine-filled jungles. The film offers access to key players, including “Blue Tiger” a former child soldier turned looter who now fights to return stolen artifacts.
The film tells the gripping story of the contrast of rich and poor as viewers learn about multi-million-dollar sales of works looted by Cambodian farmers paid $20.00 per week while risking their lives. LOOT : A Story of Crime and Redemption also takes viewers behind-the-scenes as stolen pieces are returned to Cambodia, including some arriving from New York’s Met Museum in July 2024. With thousands of pieces still overseas, Cambodia’s relentless struggle continues against the most powerful figures in the art world today.
Tess Davis, a lawyer and archaeologist by training, is Executive Director of the Antiquities Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and protection of art, artifacts, and cultural pieces. She oversees the organization’s work to fight cultural racketeering and also manages the day-to-day operations of the institute’s staff in Washington, DC, as well as programs overseas. Since 2013, Davis has been affiliated with the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, at the University of Glasgow. She came to Scotland from the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation — a not-for-profit institution based in Washington, DC — where she was Executive Director until 2012. She previously worked for the nongovernmental organization Heritage Watch in Cambodia, first as Project Coordinator, and finally Assistant Director. Her career began at the Archaeological Institute of America.
Over the last decade, Davis has conducted extensive field research on the illicit trade in Cambodian antiquities, as well as legal research on the kingdom’s cultural property law. She also conceptualized and implemented a number of exciting projects in the country, including an exhibition at Angkor Wat about threats facing the temple, a hotline for the public to report archaeological discoveries or looting, and a children’s book entitled “If the Stones Could Speak.” From 2012-2014, she directed a legal internship program in Phnom Penh for international students from the Tulane-Siena Institute, who assist the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts with their legal needs. Davis has been a legal consultant for the Cambodian and US governments and works with both the art world and law enforcement to keep looted antiquities off the market. She writes and speaks widely on these issues — having been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the Huffington Post, and various scholarly publications — and featured in documentaries.
Her co-panelist was Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos, who is Professor of Law at the University of Athens, Greece, and the former President of the European Court of Human Rights. Moderating was Israr Khan, President of the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society which draws much of its membership from the University of Oxford.
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.
exchange of notes 