Charles Villa-Vicencio

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Charles Villa-Vicencio
Born7 November 1942
NationalitySouth African
Board member ofDirector of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Academic work
DisciplineReligious studies
Institutions University of Cape Town

Charles Villa-Vicencio is an Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town. [1] He is also a Visiting research professor at Georgetown University. He was a director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which organised the public hearings on the atrocities committed during apartheid.

Contents

Career

He was a Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Cape Town. [2] He is presently an Emeritus Professor of that university. [1] He was the National Research Director of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

A regular contributor to debate in South Africa, his present work is largely in the area of transitional justice. He is currently worked, or has worked, in countries with fractious societies ripped apart by civil war or ethnic strife. These range from the Basque separatist movement, Peru, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Rwanda, and other African countries.

He is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation which he founded in 2000 after his gig at the TRC.

Publications

Journal articles

Books

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Truth commission</span> Commission tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert I. Rotberg</span> American academic

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The Equity and Reconciliation Commission is a Moroccan human rights and truth commission created on January 7, 2004, when King Mohammed VI signed a Dahir. The commission was established to reconcile victims of human rights abuses, such as torture, forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests, committed by the government and high-ranking officials during the Years of Lead, with the State. The commission investigates events from 1956 to 1999, spanning the reign of the two previous monarchs. The proclaimed objectives of the commission were the protection and the promotion of the human rights in Morocco.

Transitional justice is a process which responds to massive human rights violations through judicial redress, political reforms in a region or country, and other measures in order to prevent the recurrence of human rights abuse. Transitional justice consists of judicial and non-judicial measures implemented in order to redress legacies of human rights abuses. Such mechanisms "include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms" as well as memorials, apologies, and various art forms. Transitional justice is instituted at a point of political transition classically from war to positive peace, or more broadly from violence and repression to societal stability and it is informed by a society's desire to rebuild social trust, reestablish what is right from what is wrong, repair a fractured justice system, and build a democratic system of governance. The core value of transitional justice is the very notion of justice—which does not necessarily mean criminal justice. This notion and the political transformation, such as regime change or transition from conflict are thus linked to a more peaceful, certain, and democratic future.

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Jane Taylor is a South African writer, playwright and academic. She currently holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She is the director of the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO), a Centre for the theoretical and material exploration of the Subject/Object continuum. The Centre engages in performance arts as well as research and intellectual enquiry into the human and technological interface, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Intelligent Amplification (IA). Her recent performance/lecture “Ne’er So Much the Ape” [which takes its title from an old English adage, ‘ne’er so much the Ape as when he wears the doctor’s cape’] explores the articulation of primate research, race theory, AI, and performance theory.

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Sheena Duncan was a South African anti-Apartheid activist and counselor. Duncan was the daughter of Jean Sinclair, one of the co-founders of the Black Sash, a group of white, middle-class South African women who offered support to black South Africans and advocated the non-violent abolishment of the Apartheid system. Duncan served two terms as the leader of Black Sash.

Alexander Lionel Boraine was a South African politician, minister, and anti-apartheid activist.

Pablo de Greiff is a Colombian academic and human rights activist, who served as the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. In January 2015 he was also asked to be part of UNIIB, a United Nations mission of Independent Experts to address the situation in Burundi. From 2019 to 2020 he was part of a group of experts advising the UN Human Rights Council on its preventive functions. Since 2014 he is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at New York University, where he directs both the Transitional Justice Program and the Prevention Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute for Justice and Reconciliation</span>

The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) is a non-governmental organisation and think tank based in Cape Town, South Africa. It was forged out of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2000. The aim was to ensure that lessons learnt from South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy were taken into account as the nation moved ahead. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was the patron of the IJR.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">John W. de Gruchy</span>

John W. de Gruchy is a Christian theologian known for his work resisting apartheid. He is presently Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch.

Yasmin Louise Sooka is a leading human rights lawyer, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa and a trustee of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre. She was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and got a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. She is an expert on transitional justice, gender and international war crimes.

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Erik Doxtader is a scholar of rhetoric and critical theory. Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, Doxtader took a BA at the University of Kansas and both an MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

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