Melanie O'Brien
Dr Melanie O’Brien is Associate Professor of International Law in the UWA Law School (University of Western Australia), Perth, Australia; and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). Dr O'Brien was 2023-24 Visiting Professor at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota, USA; and is a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the UMN Law School.
Dr O'Brien's work on forced marriage has been cited by the International Criminal Court, and she has been an amicus curiae before the ICC. She has been an expert consultant for multiple UN bodies, and is widely consulted by global media for her expertise on international criminal law. She has conducted fieldwork and research across six continents.
Dr O'Brien is a member of the WA International Humanitarian Law Committee of the Australian Red Cross. She was a 2022 Research Fellow at the Sydney Jewish Museum & a 2023 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Loughborough, UK.
Dr O'Brien is the author of Criminalising Peacekeepers: Modernising National Approaches to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (Palgrave, 2017) and From Discrimination to Death: Genocide Process through a Human Rights Lens (Routledge, 2022).
Grad Cert Tertiary Teaching (UWA, Aus)
PhD (University of Nottingham, UK)
LLM in International Human Rights Law (Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, University of Lund, Sweden)
Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
BA/LLB (University of Newcastle, Australia)
Melanie’s previous work includes the Legal Advisory Section of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; the International Criminal Justice Unit of the Nottingham University Human Rights Law Centre; the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations; for the Raoul Wallenberg Institute; at the Australian Law Reform Commission; and at the NSW Crown Solicitor’s Office. She is an admitted legal practitioner.
Address: UWA Law School (M253)
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley, Perth
Western Australia 6009
Australia
Dr O'Brien's work on forced marriage has been cited by the International Criminal Court, and she has been an amicus curiae before the ICC. She has been an expert consultant for multiple UN bodies, and is widely consulted by global media for her expertise on international criminal law. She has conducted fieldwork and research across six continents.
Dr O'Brien is a member of the WA International Humanitarian Law Committee of the Australian Red Cross. She was a 2022 Research Fellow at the Sydney Jewish Museum & a 2023 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Loughborough, UK.
Dr O'Brien is the author of Criminalising Peacekeepers: Modernising National Approaches to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (Palgrave, 2017) and From Discrimination to Death: Genocide Process through a Human Rights Lens (Routledge, 2022).
Grad Cert Tertiary Teaching (UWA, Aus)
PhD (University of Nottingham, UK)
LLM in International Human Rights Law (Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, University of Lund, Sweden)
Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
BA/LLB (University of Newcastle, Australia)
Melanie’s previous work includes the Legal Advisory Section of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; the International Criminal Justice Unit of the Nottingham University Human Rights Law Centre; the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations; for the Raoul Wallenberg Institute; at the Australian Law Reform Commission; and at the NSW Crown Solicitor’s Office. She is an admitted legal practitioner.
Address: UWA Law School (M253)
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley, Perth
Western Australia 6009
Australia
less
InterestsView All (65)
Uploads
Books by Melanie O'Brien
From Discrimination to Death studies the process of genocide through the human rights violations that occur during genocide. Using individual testimonies and in-depth field research from the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide, this book demonstrates that a pattern of specific escalating human rights abuses takes place in genocide. Offering an analysis of all these particular human rights as they are violated in genocide, the author intricately brings together genocide studies and human rights, demonstrating how the ‘crime of crimes’ and the human rights law regime correlate. The book applies the pattern of rights violations to the Rohingya Genocide, revealing that this pattern could have been used to prevent the violence against the Rohingya, before advocating for a greater role for human rights oversight bodies in genocide prevention.
The pattern ascertained through the research in this book offers a resource for governments and human rights practitioners as a mid-stream indicator for genocide prevention. It can also be used by lawyers and judges in genocide trials to help determine whether genocide took place. Undergraduate and postgraduate students, particularly of genocide studies, will also greatly benefit from this book.
This book examines Australia’s and the United States’ ability to prosecute their peacekeepers for sexual exploitation and abuse. The United Nations has too long been plagued by sexual exploitation and abuse in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Discussion within United Nations’ reporting and academic scholarship focuses on policy; however, a significant concern outlined here is that peacekeepers are committing sexual offences with impunity, despite exclusive criminal jurisdiction over peacekeepers being granted to their sending states. In this original study O’Brien provides an in-depth, feminist analysis of US and Australian sexual offending law and jurisdiction over their military and military-civilian peacekeepers. Based on timely critical analysis, this book demonstrates the limitations states face in ensuring accountability for sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers – a factor which directly contributes to ongoing commission of and impunity for such offences. Calling for a rights-based, transnational law response to these crimes, this engaging and thought-provoking work will appeal to international practitioners, governments, UN policy-makers, and scholars of international, military and criminal law.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Melanie O'Brien
Criminal accountability is one method of genocide prevention; a vital mechanism. For the most part, perpetrators of genocide live out their lives with impunity for their actions, resulting in a lack of deterrence to current and future perpetrators. Regardless of age, or the lapse in time since atrocities were committed, perpetrators of mass atrocities should be held criminally accountable. The International Criminal Court has made great strides towards prevention through accountability, however, unfortunately, some states lack the courage of their convictions and there is a need for greater accountability in order to ensure prevention.
This paper provides an analysis of the disproportionate impact of the 2014 West Africa Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic on women, presenting an assessment of how this impact in particular is linked with violence against women and women's right to health, and a critique of improvements that could avoid discrimination against women in healthcare crises.
Design/methodology/approach:
This paper covers conceptual understandings of, and utilises a human rights law and public health lens to analyse how the Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in West Africa both directly and indirectly caused greater harm to women and girls. All these factors which represent intersectional violations of the human rights of women are examined with a focus on violence against women and the right to health.
Findings:
There are multiple reasons why the EVD outbreak harmed women disproportionately, and this intersectionality of discrimination must be considered in any response to a public health crisis. Addressing the vulnerability of women and girls to all forms of violence involves the coordinated efforts of public health, legal, and political actors to empower women.
Originality/value:
Specific issues of the 2014 West Africa EVD outbreak have been examined in medical journals, but there have been no academic studies that present a cross-disciplinary analysis of the gender concerns. This paper combines a public health perspective with a human rights law viewpoint in order to consider the impact of the EVD outbreak on women and provide suggestions as to how discrimination and disadvantage of women in such health crises can be avoided.
From Discrimination to Death studies the process of genocide through the human rights violations that occur during genocide. Using individual testimonies and in-depth field research from the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide, this book demonstrates that a pattern of specific escalating human rights abuses takes place in genocide. Offering an analysis of all these particular human rights as they are violated in genocide, the author intricately brings together genocide studies and human rights, demonstrating how the ‘crime of crimes’ and the human rights law regime correlate. The book applies the pattern of rights violations to the Rohingya Genocide, revealing that this pattern could have been used to prevent the violence against the Rohingya, before advocating for a greater role for human rights oversight bodies in genocide prevention.
The pattern ascertained through the research in this book offers a resource for governments and human rights practitioners as a mid-stream indicator for genocide prevention. It can also be used by lawyers and judges in genocide trials to help determine whether genocide took place. Undergraduate and postgraduate students, particularly of genocide studies, will also greatly benefit from this book.
This book examines Australia’s and the United States’ ability to prosecute their peacekeepers for sexual exploitation and abuse. The United Nations has too long been plagued by sexual exploitation and abuse in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Discussion within United Nations’ reporting and academic scholarship focuses on policy; however, a significant concern outlined here is that peacekeepers are committing sexual offences with impunity, despite exclusive criminal jurisdiction over peacekeepers being granted to their sending states. In this original study O’Brien provides an in-depth, feminist analysis of US and Australian sexual offending law and jurisdiction over their military and military-civilian peacekeepers. Based on timely critical analysis, this book demonstrates the limitations states face in ensuring accountability for sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers – a factor which directly contributes to ongoing commission of and impunity for such offences. Calling for a rights-based, transnational law response to these crimes, this engaging and thought-provoking work will appeal to international practitioners, governments, UN policy-makers, and scholars of international, military and criminal law.
Criminal accountability is one method of genocide prevention; a vital mechanism. For the most part, perpetrators of genocide live out their lives with impunity for their actions, resulting in a lack of deterrence to current and future perpetrators. Regardless of age, or the lapse in time since atrocities were committed, perpetrators of mass atrocities should be held criminally accountable. The International Criminal Court has made great strides towards prevention through accountability, however, unfortunately, some states lack the courage of their convictions and there is a need for greater accountability in order to ensure prevention.
This paper provides an analysis of the disproportionate impact of the 2014 West Africa Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic on women, presenting an assessment of how this impact in particular is linked with violence against women and women's right to health, and a critique of improvements that could avoid discrimination against women in healthcare crises.
Design/methodology/approach:
This paper covers conceptual understandings of, and utilises a human rights law and public health lens to analyse how the Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in West Africa both directly and indirectly caused greater harm to women and girls. All these factors which represent intersectional violations of the human rights of women are examined with a focus on violence against women and the right to health.
Findings:
There are multiple reasons why the EVD outbreak harmed women disproportionately, and this intersectionality of discrimination must be considered in any response to a public health crisis. Addressing the vulnerability of women and girls to all forms of violence involves the coordinated efforts of public health, legal, and political actors to empower women.
Originality/value:
Specific issues of the 2014 West Africa EVD outbreak have been examined in medical journals, but there have been no academic studies that present a cross-disciplinary analysis of the gender concerns. This paper combines a public health perspective with a human rights law viewpoint in order to consider the impact of the EVD outbreak on women and provide suggestions as to how discrimination and disadvantage of women in such health crises can be avoided.
But while many reviewers have commented on the “moral ambiguity” and “realism” of Fury, hardly any have commented on a key “sex scene” that made me wish I hadn’t gone to see it – and left me wondering what Pitt’s wife Angelina Jolie thinks too.
https://theconversation.com/the-rape-scene-in-brad-pitts-fury-no-one-is-talking-about-33638
Ratko Mladić’s guilty conviction for war crimes against humanity has an important meaning for victims, University of Queensland academic Dr Melanie O’Brien has said.
Gen. Ratko Mladić was sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) last week. The former Bosnian Serb commander was deemed by the tribunal to be the orchestrator of a bloody campaign to create one homogenous state.
The former commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladić, has been found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and sentenced to life in prison.
Mladić was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The tribunal declared that the crimes he committed were “among the most heinous known to humankind”.
The genocidal process has been examined by second generation genocide scholars such as Greg Stanton in his ‘8 Stages of Genocide’. This paper will assess the genocidal process through a human rights lens. Every aspect of the genocidal process results in human rights violations. These start at the lower end of the scale, for example with restrictions on freedom of expression (such as through the burning of books), progressing through to widespread discrimination (such as by denial of employment for certain groups), before eventually resulting in violations of fundamental rights such as freedom from torture and of course the right to life.
Resistance tends to be lower in the initial stages of genocide, as human rights restrictions appear to be less important or not as worrisome. Perhaps people find that such restrictions do not impinge upon lives too significantly. This is what allows the process to continue, and indeed ‘permits’ other states to avoid interfering for protection and prevention, as the violations do not seem too grave or serious at this point. This lack of action by states can be viewed as complicity.
Yet there is a specific path of human rights violations that the genocidal process follows, and can be used in genocide prevention. Through an examination of this path taken in past genocides, a framework can be developed through which observations of human rights violations can be assessed in order to determine whether a current situation has the potential to lead to genocide. Not all human rights violations exist in a genocidal context, therefore that framework and path is quite specific. That is, the human rights violations experienced in the genocidal process experience an escalation in intensity, and also always include specific violations such as discrimination.
This paper will examine the genocidal path of human rights violations using examples from past genocides such as the Holocaust, Cambodia and Rwanda. It will demonstrate some of the human rights violations encountered on the path to genocide, with reference to not only policies implemented and actions taken by the regimes, but also personal experiences of survivors, including how one person can experience the whole gambit of rights violations. The framework will also show the unfortunate accuracy of Hitler’s words, exposing the success in the gradual manifestation of human rights violations leading to genocide.
The majority of interviews by investigators or lawyers require the assistance of an interpreter. What are the advantages and the challenges of having to use an interpreter when interviewing suspects? The second part of this paper will present the role and experiences of the interpreter in international criminal investigative interviews, and how the interpreter can help or hinder an investigator’s techniques for obtaining information and the truth during a perpetrator interview."
Modern piracy has a significant global impact. There were 410 piracy attacks in 2009, 445 in 2010, and 439 in 2011 (Annual IMB Piracy Report, 2011). As of 19 March 2012, there were 197 vessels being held hostage by Somali pirates; and there had already been 87 pirate attacks worldwide since the start of 2012, with nine of those resulting in successful hijackings (IMB Piracy News & Figures).
The economic effects of piracy are felt not just by corporations but have a trickle-down effect to the everyday consumer by increasing costs of products and services such as energy. A report by One Earth Future's (OEF) Oceans Beyond Piracy initiative estimated Somali piracy's impact on the global economy to be $7 billion for 2011. A previous report by OEF estimated the global cost of piracy for 2010 to be in the range of $7 to $12 billion. The human cost is also high. Most of the attacks involve the use of weapons, which causes risk to the ship, cargo, and the environment, but most importantly risk of injury and death to seafarers. From 2007 to 2011, 42 people were killed as a result of piracy attacks, and 215 injured. While the number of deaths may appear relatively low, the number of people taken hostage in the same period is staggering: 4207.
Such high numbers of economic impact and human costs reveal the significant scale of the piracy problem today. Yet criminal accountability for piracy has been almost non-existent, due to logistical and jurisdictional difficulties. The ICC as a forum for prosecuting maritime pirates has been dismissed cavalierly by the UN, yet in this case international criminal law needs to be seen as an instrument of justice. The ICC aims to prevent and punish crimes committed on a large scale, crimes that ‘threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world’. Piracy is certainly being committed on a large, global scale, and impacting global security and well-being. It goes far beyond being merely a crime of personal gain, demonstrating the suitability of the Court as a forum for prosecuting pirates. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the potential of the ICC for prosecuting pirates: why it should be considered as a potential forum for ensuring criminal accountability for piracy, even with non-state actors as perpetrators, and whether or not piracy should be added to the Rome Statute as a stand-alone crime or under the rubric of crimes against humanity."
In turn, individual criminal responsibility triggers state responsibility. Under Status of Forces Agreements, and Memoranda of Understanding, sending states retain the exclusive disciplinary jurisdiction over their personnel. Yet case law such as Behrami and Saramati (European Court of Human Rights) demonstrates a lack of willingness of international legal bodies to attribute state responsibility for the actions of peacekeepers, based on the reasoning that they are under the command of the UN. In contrast, a Dutch court ruled The Netherlands to be responsible for 3 deaths at Srebrenica due to (in)actions of its peacekeepers.
When the specific circumstances of peacekeeper criminal misconduct are applied through the interpretation of the case law and state obligations under international and regional instruments, responsibility can be attributable to sending states, based on states’ allocated disciplinary control over their personnel. This enables states to be held responsible for failing to hold perpetrators criminally accountable.
This paper will demonstrate the criteria for allocating responsibility to individual peacekeeper perpetrators and commanders/superiors for criminal misconduct; and the relationship between this individual responsibility and state responsibility, with reference to ECtHR case law and the Dutch Srebrenica cases."
This paper will explore the development of the crimes of sexual slavery, forced prostitution, and forced marriage in international criminal justice, examining the case law of, inter alia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Differences between the crimes will be compared. This paper will also tackle definitional overlap between these three crimes, and between these crimes and other crimes such as torture, and how the courts and tribunals have dealt with any common characteristics.
However, while there has been some development of jurisprudence, despite the extensive commission of these crimes in mass atrocities, there remains a lack of willingness of international criminal courts and tribunals to address gender-based sexual offences. Reasons behind this reluctance to ensure justice for women victims of sexual crimes will be confronted."
This paper will discuss the author’s inter-disciplinary study of interview techniques in international criminal courts and tribunals, seeking to address some pertinent issues with regards to interviewing suspects and insider witnesses. Such issues include the specific difficulties faced by investigators with regards to interviewing suspects and insider witnesses of international crimes that do not exist in the domestic context of ‘ordinary’ crimes. This analysis is undertaken through domestic interview techniques analysis and interviews by the author with investigators and lawyers from one or more of the international tribunals or courts. This paper is based on a project that aims to ultimately assist practitioners in international criminal justice to increase their success in prosecutions, and contribute to an increase in guilt admissions.
This paper will examine two potential serious human rights violations that the impending trial of Watson presents: ne bis in idem, and extra-territorial jurisdiction. While Australia avoided violating international law by deporting rather than extraditing Watson, the first concern is that the US state of Alabama is seeking to try Watson for conduct he was already convicted of by an Australian court. The second issue is whether a state of the USA has the jurisdiction to try one of their nationals for conduct committed in the territory of Australia. An analysis of this specific case and its charges will be presented in the context of the Australian, US, and international application of extra-territorial jurisdiction and the ne bis in idem principle.
An important element of reconciliation and societal reconstruction after genocide and other mass atrocities is that perpetrators accept responsibility for, and recognise the consequences of, their actions. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written that “the process of forgiveness also requires acknowledgment on the part of the perpetrator that they have committed an offence”. Through inter-disciplinary psychological and socio-legal literature, the mechanisms will be contrasted, examining how a perpetrator’s potential fate affects the choice a perpetrator makes whether or not to confess to genocide. Additional influences such as evidence, suspect interviewing techniques, and procedural justice are discussed.