Justice and Time
Philippe Sands and Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann
23.6.2025, 19:00
Grand Session Hall, Lviv City Council (1 Rynok Square)
On May 9, 2025, a "Lviv Statement" was signed on the premises of the Lviv City Council. This statement is a political commitment to establishing the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. A document looking into the future, it also recognizes the past and acknowledges the role the city of Lviv played in the formation of international criminal law.
Commenting on the Statement, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, underlined that "[t]he people of Ukraine deserve justice, and we will do everything in our power to make sure they get it." In the context of aggressive war, the question of justice is omnipresent, meaning "very different things to different people", as suggested by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk.
In public discussion "Justice and Time", we will explore how justice unfolds in n different temporalities by taking international law's and psychoanalysis's perspectives. For this, we invited Prof. Philippe Sands, an international lawyer and writer, and Dr. Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. Philippe Sands came to Lviv in 2010 and has returned many times since to explore both the history of international law and his family, in particular in his book "East West Street". Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann came to Ukraine after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion to work together with the Unbroken Rehabilitation Center in Lviv.
Together, we will reflect on the history of our contemporary understanding of justice, both as a concept and as an institutional practice; the interplay between justice and politics and its consequences; and the work with the consequences of trauma(s) using the instruments of law and psychoanalysis, especially in times of war.
Philippe Sands
QC, author of “East West Street,” Professor of Law at University College London and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University
Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann
Ph.D., Psychoanalyst, Clinical consultant at Primo Levi Center in Paris
Daria Badior
editor-in-chief of re/visions journal, critic, film curator.
The event is organized in partnership between Lviv City Council, Unbroken Rehabilitation Center, Center for Urban History, Faktura 10, Max Weber Foundation's Research Centre Ukraine, and in cooperation with the International Forum “Unbroken Justice.”
Credit
Cover image: Lviv City Council