Contributors

Trail Reports

Ewing Ahmed
Congolese journalist
Congolese journalist Ewing Ahmed is based in Bukavu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where he reports on transitional justice issues for Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a conflict resolution and conflict prevention NGO. He has reported for Congolese national radio, private radio in Bukavu, and for the United Nations station Radio Okapi. Since October 2008, Ahmed has been the Swahili presenter of the IWPR/SFCG radio program “Facing Justice,” which brings news of the International Criminal Court and Congolese justice issues to listeners throughout the DRC.

Meribeth Deen
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Meribeth Deen worked as a radio producer and reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation between 2005 and 2008. In 2008, she moved to the UK to produce a radio documentary on the British human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. Her documentaries appear on CBC Radio programmes including The Current and Dispatches and on the Radio Netherlands human rights show, The State We’re In.

Jennifer Easterday
Legal Researcher, U.C. Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, USA
Jennifer Easterday is a senior researcher with the U.C. Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center in California, USA. Jennifer received her JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and is a member of the California State Bar. She has published research on the principle of complementarity at the ICC, and on various issues arising in the Special Court for Sierra Leone trial of Charles Taylor.

Rachel Irwin
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Rachel Irwin writes about international justice for The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in The Hague. She has penned in-depth articles about issues relating to cases at the International Criminal Court and covered trials at International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Most recently, she traveled to Bosnia to write a special report on war atrocity denial in the eastern town of Visegrad. Before her work with IWPR, she studied theatre and dance in India, taught English in South Korea, and spent several months in Israel covering art and politics for the Jerusalem Post. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Yvonne McDermott
Yvonne McDermott is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in international criminal law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights.

Wairangala Wakabi
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Wairagala Wakabi is a Ugandan journalist covering the trial of Thomas Lubanga for IWPR-The Netherlands. Wakabi has covered the Congo war since 1998, reporting for The Star (South Africa), The EastAfrican (Kenya), The Lancet (UK) and New Internationalist (UK).
Commentary

Bukeni Tete Waruzi
Program coordinator for Africa and the Middle East, WITNESS
Bukeni Tete Waruzi is the program coordinator for Africa and the Middle East for WITNESS. He is a native of Uvira, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where he worked for over eight years on the issue of child soldiers and children affected by armed conflict. He founded and served as the executive director of Ajedi-Ka/Child Soldiers Project, an organization working to demobilize and reintegrate child soldiers in the DRC. During his organization’s partnership with WITNESS, Bukeni produced several films on child soldiers and the spread of HIV/AIDS in the DRC. He also implemented the use of cell phones as a means of monitoring and reporting child rights violations. Bukeni holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Evangelical University in Africa in Bukavu (DRC) and a master’s degree in human rights and conflict resolution from Chaire Unesco in Bujumbura (Burundi). Bukeni speaks English, French, and Swahili and is conversational in five languages and dialects of the Great Lakes region of Africa.
Legal Analysis

Tracey Gurd
Legal officer for International Justice, Open Society Justice Initiative
Tracey Gurd serves as the Open Society Justice Initiative’s legal officer for International Justice. The mandate of her program is to support the work of the international criminal tribunals, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), through monitoring, advocacy and legal analysis. She has worked previously as a legal academic, a journalist, and an international policy adviser for the Australian government in both Australia and Central Europe. Tracey has co-edited an academic collection on women and armed conflict, Listening to the Silences: Women and War and is co-editing a forthcoming collection on efforts to make international justice meaningful to war afflicted communities.