Pablo de Greiff was appointed by the UN OHCHR to serve as an independent member of the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine in 2022 and by the Human Rights Council to serve as the first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence in 2012. He was renewed in 2015 and held the position until May 2018. In January 2015 he was also asked to be part of UNIIB, a mission of Independent Experts to address the situation in Burundi.
Since 2014, de Greiff has been Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at the School of Law, New York University. Prior to joining NYU, he served as Research Director at ICTJ since its founding in 2001 until 2014, making important contributions to the organization and the field of transitional justice. As director of the ICTJ’s Research Unit he was responsible for projects that were the first of their kind and that became reference works in the field, including The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford, 2006), Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections (SSRC, 2009), and Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-combatants (SSRC, 2010), among others. While at the ICTJ, he worked extensively on a holistic or comprehensive conception of transitional justice that has become influential in the field.
De Greiff has published extensively on transitions to democracy, democratic theory, and the relationship between morality, politics, and law. He is the editor of ten books, including Jürgen Habermas’s The Inclusion of the Other (MIT Press, 1998), and in areas related to transitional justice. De Greiff contributed to the drafting of the final report of the Stockholm Initiative on DDR, authored the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict States: Reparations Programmes and was an advisor to the World Bank on the process leading to the World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development. He serves on the board of editors of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and has been an advisor to different transitional justice bodies in Peru, Guatemala, Morocco, Colombia, and the Philippines.
As Special Rapporteur, he has presented five thematic reports to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly (on a comprehensive approach to transitional justice, on transitional justice and the rule of law, on transitional justice and development, on truth commissions, and on prosecutorial strategies) and three country visit reports (Tunisia, Uruguay, and Spain).
Born in Colombia, he graduated from Yale University (BA) and from Northwestern University (PhD). He has combined a distinguished academic career with a long trajectory as a practitioner, advising multilateral and national institutions and civil society organizations on justice issues in countries around the globe.
