Local Consultants
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Irene Nasser is a media and television producer. Based in Jerusalem, she has worked both locally and abroad. Over the past few years, Irene has worked with Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and many others. Irene was also a media producer with groups such as Activestills, a photographers collective focusing on civic and political change. In addition to speaking internationally about media, social media, and women’s movements, Irene has trained and facilitated various groups on topics such as social media, women and youth’s role in social and political movements, and advocacy and mobilization.
Previously, Irene was the Strategic Projects Coordinator at Just Vision, where she worked to expand the reach of the organization’s new and existing projects that tell the stories of community organizers. As part of her work at Just Vision, Irene produced and created an Arabic Graphic Novel, Budrus (based on a film directed by Julia Bacha), that tells the powerful story of 15-year-old Iltezam Morrar who mobilizes women in her village to join and lead an unarmed resistance campaign to save their village land from confiscation. Irene is also the co-producer of a series of short films, Home Front (Aspen ShortFest Official Selection 2012) as well as My Neighbourhood, (Winner of the 2012 Peabody Award, the 2012 Al Jazeera Documentary Film Festival Award, and Official Selection of the Tribeca Film Festival 2012, among many others).
Irene is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English and is the co-author of “Textbooks as a Vehicle for Segregation and Domination: State Efforts to Shape Palestinian Israelis’ Identities as Citizens” in the Journal of Curriculum Studies (Vol. 40, 2008). She received an MA in International Service from American University, Washington, DC in 2007. Her thesis focused on the intersection of conflict and identity, and the role of oral history in forming the identity of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
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Alex is a Manchester-based barrister and mediator with twenty years’ practical legal experience in national and international human rights, humanitarian and criminal law, transitional justice, conflict resolution and rule of law issues.
Alex spent ten years as a barrister in the UK and five years as an international prosecutor for the United Nations in Kosovo and Cambodia. Over the last five years he has provided consulting advice to governments, international organisations and businesses in his fields of expertise. He has a particular expertise in justice system capacity building, including delivering specific training projects on rule of law issues in Cambodia, Croatia, Lebanon, Myanmar and Uzbekistan.He was a founding partner of the legal advisory firm Global Diligence LLP, based in Paris and London, dealing with issues of business and human rights. He holds an LLM in international human rights and humanitarian law from Lancaster University, a BA in law from Cambridge University and a UN certificate in cross-cultural negotiation. A Visiting Fellow of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Alex regularly lectures, trains and publishes on issues of international criminal law, human rights and transitional justice.
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Venitia Govender has been involved in research, documentation, campaigning and monitoring of human rights promotion, protection and violations involving the security forces and proxy agencies in South and Southern Africa for over twenty years.
She has held positions in both government and local and international civil society organisations in post- apartheid South Africa.
In the early 1990s in South Africa she managed an independent violence monitoring organisation – Peace Action – and was subsequently a senior researcher at the Independent Board of Inquiry into Informal Repression (a forerunner to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission).
She was national coordinator for the Police and Prison Officers Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) and then a legal advisor in the civilian secretariat – Ministry of Safety and Security. She also served as National Director of a major NGO – Human Rights Committee.
She is currently the South Africa Director of the campaigning organisation Crisis Action. She is an international solidarity activist working on campaigns in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and South Sudan.
Venetia received her law degree from the University of Durban Westville and was an Abe Bailey scholarship recipient in 1990.
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Salwa El Gantri has been researching in the fields of democracy, human rights and transitional justice since 2007. She has held positions in both Tunisia and Egypt in international, regional and local NGOs such as Freedom House, the Arab Institute for Human Rights, and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
She is currently the focal point for the gender justice program at the Tunisia Office of the International Center for Transitional Justice.
El Gantri is also a Master Trainer in Human Rights (accredited by Raoul Wallenberg Institute on Human Rights & Humanitarian Law) and has been providing capacity building for civil society and women victims since 2011, mainly on Gender & Transitional Justice.
She holds a degree from the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, Tunisia, and in 2005 received a Master’s degree with honors in International Public Law from the University of Tunis. Her dissertation was on ‘The Preventive War through the (2002) National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ (the one of 2002).
El Gantri is currently a PhD candidate within the Faculty of Legal, Political and Social Sciences at Carthage University, focusing on Gender in the Transitional Justice Process in Tunisia.
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Cath Collins joined the Transitional Justice Institute at the Ulster University in March 2013 from the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, where she was Associate Professor of Politics and founded and directed the Human Rights Observatory, a project mapping justice, truth and memory developments in Chile related to the Pinochet era dictatorship.
During this time she published the books ‘The Politics of Memory in Chile’ (co-edited) and ‘Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador’. She also wrote and co-produced manuals and workshop materials for national relatives associations and worked with lawyers, judicial personnel, the forensic service and detective police to improve coordination and treatment of witnesses in human rights trials. She travelled widely in Latin America taking part in regional discussions about transitional justice processes including the recently convened Brazilian truth commission (2012-)
She is currently completing a three year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway on (post) transitional justice processes in 9 Latin American countries, and other projects related to 2013’s anniversaries of the Chilean coup of 1973 and the Pinochet arrest in 1998. Her teaching and supervision interests include Latin American politics, globalization and judicialization of politics.
Cath did graduate studies in politics at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London between 2001 and 2004, and lectured there briefly before becoming the Chatham House Research Fellow for Latin America (2005-2007). Prior to working in academia she was a youth and community worker in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and the UK working in HIV projects, with youth groups and in prisons.
