Professor Cath Collins

Professor Collins is a professor of transitional justice at the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI), a law-led interdisciplinary research institute at Ulster University.

She was previously an associate professor of politics at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, where she founded and still directs the Transitional Justice Observatory.

Her work in Chile and Uruguay forms part of an ongoing Ulster University Open Society Foundation-funded project supporting responses to enforced disappearance in Latin America.

The two countries have a legacy of military dictatorship that includes Plan Condor, a US-backed campaign of political repression and state terror which involved active clandestine collaboration between secret police and military intelligence to monitor, assassinate, and “disappear” dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.

The exchange led to a commitment to joint work on a legal case involving the disappearance of a married couple in Uruguay and the subsequent abandonment of their infant children, aged two and four, in a public square in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso.

During the visit, Professor Collins also discussed her ongoing work on models of state response to enforced disappearance with Uruguay’s national human rights institution, which is about to take over responsibility for search and identification.