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Bournemouth University Researcher Secures Prestigious Wingate Scholarship
Added: (Tue Oct 23 2007)
A Business School researcher has been recognised for her investigations into international human rights.
PhD student Melanie Klinkner secured a prestigious Wingate Scholarship from the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation.
The Foundation’s Scholarship Committee was convinced of the value of Melanie’s research which concerns criminal investigations under the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. The work looks closely at the cooperation between lawyers and forensic scientists in post-conflict reconstruction and peace building.
“International criminal law has developed considerably over the last 15 years,” explains Melanie, “and since the mid-1980s, forensic scientists have been instrumental in finding, identifying and returning the bodies of missing people on a mass scale.”
Together with her supervisors - international lawyer Professor Nick Grief, Head of the Law Department at BU, and forensic archaeologist Professor Margaret Cox at Cranfield - Melanie believes that the time has come to examine the importance and effectiveness of the interplay between lawyers and forensic scientists.
After conducting interviews with judicial officers in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh earlier this year, Melanie has just returned from a field trip to The Hague where she met representatives of the ICTY and the International Criminal Court.
Wingate Scholarships are awarded as a result of an annual competition to support pioneering or original work of intellectual, scientific, artistic, social or environmental value. In 2007, there were 478 applications, 99 people were interviewed and 42 scholarships were awarded.
Kris Stevens - 23 October 2007