Pablo de Greiff Senior was just appointed in December 2018 by the President of the UN Human Rights Council as a Rapporteur in the group of experts to advise the Council on its prevention role.  In 2012 he had been appointed as the first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence a position he held until May 2018.  In January 2015 he was also asked to be part of UNIIB, a mission of Independent Experts to address the situation in Burundi.  He is currently a member of the UN Secretary General’s Civilian Advisory Board, and is Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at NYU.  Prior to joining NYU he was the Director of Research at the International Center for Transitional Justice from 2001 to 2014.

 

Born in Colombia, he graduated from Yale University (B.A.) and from Northwestern University (Ph.D.). Before joining ICTJ, he was an associate professor with tenure in the Philosophy department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught ethics and political theory. He was Laurance S. Rockefeller fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and held a concurrent fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

De Greiff is the editor or coeditor of ten books, including Jürgen Habermas’s The Inclusion of the Other (MIT Press, 1998), Global Justice and Transnational Politics (MIT Press, 2002), Las Razones de la Justicia A Festschrift for Thomas McCarthy (México: UNAM, 2006), and in areas related to transitional justice, The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford, 2006), Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections (SSRC, 2009), and Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-combatants (SSRC, 2010), among others.  De Greiff has published extensively on transitions to democracy, democratic theory, and the relationship between morality, politics, and law, and is in the board of editors of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and of several book series related to the topic.  Some of his articles include:

 

“Truth without facts.’ On the Erosion of the Fact-Finding Function of Truth Commissions,” in The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, Philip Alston & Sarah Knuckey, eds., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

 

“Transitional Justice and Development,” in International Development, Bruce Currie-Alder, Ravi Kanbur, David Malone and Rohinton Medhora, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

 

“On Making the Invisible Visible: The Role of Cultural Interventions in Transitional Justice Processes,” in, Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society Clara Ramírez-Barat, ed., (New York: Social Sciences Research Council, 2014).  

 

“El papel de las cortes constitucionales en la regulación de conflictos,” in Diálogos Constitucionales de Colombia con el Mundo¸ Juan Carlos Henao, ed.  (Bogotá: Corte Constitucional de Colombia y Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2013). 

 

“Theorizing Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice, Melissa Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster, eds. NOMOS, vol. LI (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 

 

 

He has lectured extensively, including at Yale, Harvard, Oxford (where he teaches in the Human Rights Program), Columbia, Cornell, NYU, the European University Institute, and universities across Europe and Latin America. 

 

De Greiff contributed to the drafting of the final report of the Stockholm Initiative on DDR, authored the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict States: Reparations Programmes and was an advisor to the World Bank on the process leading to the World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development. He has been an advisor to different transitional justice bodies in Peru, Guatemala, Morocco, Colombia, and the Philippines.  

 

As Special Rapporteur he presented thematic reports to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly.  Additionally, he presented country visit reports on Tunisia, Spain, Uruguay, Burundi and the United Kingdom (specifically on Northern Ireland).   Reports are available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/TruthJusticeReparation/Pages/Index.aspx

 

De Greiff is head of the Advisory Board of the Open Society’s Justice Initiative, and a member of the advisory board of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and of Universal Rights Group.