News & Events

Join us for our lunchtime seminar as part of the 'Transitional Justice Seminar Series' with Dr Courtney Curran, ‘Tracing a Tyrant's Paper Trail—Exploring the uses of archives in domestic proceedings addressing international crimes: the French Pinochet moment’.

When: 1pm-2pm Thursday, 20 November 2025

Where: Seminar Room, Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway

Dr Curran's doctoral research traces and investigates the pathways travelled by collections of archives as they served as critical evidence of mass atrocity in transnational legal cases. This study brings together the fields of transitional justice and archival theory, showing their interconnections and interdependencies. By analysing the intersection of these fields, this study provides insights into the effective use of archival evidence in transnational litigation addressing international criminality, thereby advancing the universal jurisdiction doctrine.

The focus of the lecture will be on one of the researcher's case studies—the French Pinochet moment—particularly the case of Alfonso Chanfreau. This case commenced in Chile and was litigated in France on the basis of the nationalities of four French Chilean victims, who were made to disappear by Pinochet's secret police DINA and the transnational terror network, Operation Condor. The Chanfreau case eventually came before Chilean courts around four decades later, when the context was better primed for accountability of Pinochet-era crimes in national courts.

Dr Courtney Curran is an Australia-qualified lawyer with domestic and international practising experience in government and in the private sector. Courtney has worked at multiple investigative and prosecutorial agencies in Australia and abroad and is presently engaged at the Australian Attorney-General's Department as a legal officer in the International Crime Cooperation Central Authority.

Courtney’s doctoral research explores the intersectionality of transitional justice and archival studies by tracing transnational legal efforts to address atrocity crimes. This work explores the types of evidence used in cases of this kind and assesses how archival material was identified, explained to and relied upon by foreign adjudicators sitting in third countries.

Courtney's work has been published by Routledge and the International Criminal Law Review; she has written for the ICHR's blog and been interviewed for the Human Rights Podcast; and she plans to publish her doctoral monograph as a book soon.