Given the current situation in Gaza, Mr. McGrath will be focusing his talk on the role of civil society in ensuring the integrity of International Humanitarian Law. He will be drawing on the experiences of the campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions, and in doing so, examine ways to ensure that those treaties remain meaningful, examine their inherent weaknesses and look to future areas for civil society action.
About the speaker:
A soldier in the British Army for nearly 18 years McGrath has worked since 1985 responding to the humanitarian impact of conflict and natural disaster and as an energetic and unapologetic civil society campaigner against the proliferation of indiscriminate weapons.
He was a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and represented the campaign at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1997, where he gave the Nobel lecture and is a Nobel co-Laureate. Until recently he was a member of the steering committee of the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) and author of one of the key publications examining the humanitarian impact of those weapons a result of an comprehensive study conducted during 1999/2000. He was the founder of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and served as Director until 1996 and established the first community-based humanitarian landmine clearance programme in Afghanistan in 1988. McGrath designed and implemented the first ever wide-scale landmines survey in Afghanistan in 1990/91, and conducted a first assessments of landmines North Iraq. He was co-author of the influential Human Rights Watch reports on landmine impact in Cambodia, Cowards War (1991). He subsequently researched and wrote two further reports for HRW in North Iraq (1992) and Angola (1993). In 1998 McGrath undertook field impact assessments of landmine use in Upper Nile and the Sorbat Basin in Sudan leading to protracted cooperation with the European Union 'Planning for Peace Initiative', Landmine Action, Oxfam and civil society organisations on both sides of the conflict. This work culminated in the establishment of the first landmine training and clearance programme based in the Nuba Mountains immediately following the Nuba Mountains ceasefire and two substantial assessments of landmine impact in Sudan, one focused on nomadic pastoralists whose migrations through frontline areas made them especially vulnerable.
Although best known for his work related to explosive remnants of war (ERW) McGrath has also amassed considerable experience in rehabilitation and emergency aid programmes. He worked on emergency food aid response to famine in Darfur, Ethiopia and southern Zambia during the mid-1980's, on flood response in Bangladesh and established an innovative agricultural and infrastructural rural rehabilitation programme in Paktia Province of Afghanistan in 1988. Following the Asian tsunami in December 2004 he was director of a multi-sector response programme among isolated coastal communities in Aceh and conducted an immediate air survey of the impact area of the May 2006 earthquake in Jogyakarta, Java and established medical and support services covering the worst affected communities in Bantul.
McGrath has lectured widely in many countries, on conflict, civil society, security and development issues and is a visiting lecturer and associate at the Post Conflict & Rehabilitation Unit (PRDU) of York University, and also lectures at Cornell University in New York State. He is currently working on a study of the impact of the proliferation and commercialisation of mercenaries and a project reviewing concepts of sustainability in community-based humanitarian projects. |
