Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Madam Navi Pillay to accept the invitation to be the Keynote Speaker today to share her view to the education of new lawyers and practitioners on international criminal law. Your life experience in South Africa, the Special Court for the Rwandan Genocide, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations is an excellent platform to foreseen the future.
For the University for Peace, as an entity created by the UN General Assembly to educate professionals in the area of building sustainable peace, this new meeting is of great importance.
The paradigm of peace building, of peace as the product of a series of factors that make it sustainable over time, not just the absence of war. As advocated by the 2030 Agenda SDG, consider the legal element as a fundamental. Goal 16, Peaceful Societies, especially Goal 16.3 ratifies the importance of promoting “the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all”.
Our program aims to train human capital in a crucial area in the development of access to justice. Since the revive of international justice, with the decision of the Security Council to establish an international tribunal to punish those guilty in the war in the former Yugoslavia and after the genocide in Rwanda, international criminal justice, as a complementary instance of jurisdiction national, has been growing and strengthening, not exempt from doubts and problems. It would be a mistake to think that a system created under the protection of multilateralism does not suffer in the midst of the crisis that suffer the system in this XXI century.
For UPEACE it is a great opportunity to deepen our commitment on the subject. For example, in the most recent assembly of states parties to the International Criminal Court, our professor Sergio Ugalde was elected as a new member of the Court. Also, we would like to inform that we establish a permanent chair on transnational economy and crime, as part of the permanent efforts to understand the root causes of conflicts. These are some of examples of the presence and relevance of our institution in the global debate.
This group of students will be the second group in the framework of the pandemic. It has been an important sacrifice for all of us, it has become very difficult to fulfil our purposes as we have been doing traditionally. But we have the technology and the commitment of the teams led by Giusi in Torino and Mihir in Costa Rica to guarantee that the academic quality and the construction of human capital in multilateralism continue over time.
On behalf of Rector Francisco Rojas and the entire UPEACE team in Costa Rica, Addis Abbaba, Geneva, NY, Beijing, Colombo and Manila, we want to give you the most cordial welcome and success in the program that is now beginning.
I hope to see you soon in class.
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