In Conversation with Chris Sidoti

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (Commission of Inquiry) published a comprehensive report in June 2026 on violations and crimes against and affecting Palestinian children since 7 October 2023. Based on multiple sources of information, including thousands of verified open-source evidence; medical reports, video and audio evidence, remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses, the report presents grave findings concerning genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It underlines the urgent need for accountability, protection, access to justice, and effective remedies for children and their families. 

For those working in the field of children’s rights, international law and accountability, the report raises profound legal, institutional, and ethical questions. The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, together with Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) and the Law Faculty's Public International Law Research Group, will be holding a webinar 'In Conversation with Chris Sidoti', a member of the Commission of Inquiry. This will be chaired by Diane Marie Amann, Departmental Lecturer in Public International Law, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, and there will be comments from Professor Ann Skelton, and Professor Helen Duffy.

It will be held on Monday 26th October from 1100-1300 GMT.

Chris Sidoti has been a human rights lawyer and advocate for over 50 years, working in official institutions and non-government organisations at national and international levels. Since July 2021, he has been a Commissioner on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. He is also a member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar and was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar from 2017 to 2019. He currently works from Sydney, Australia. He has been Australian Human Rights Commissioner (1995-2000) and Australian Law Reform Commissioner (1992-1995).

Diane Marie Amann is Departmental Lecturer in Public International Law, returning to the University of Oxford following prior service as a Research Visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College and Mansfield College. She is also Visiting Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science, Honorary Professor at University College London, and Regents’ Professor Emerita and Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law Emerita at the University of Georgia School of Law. Diane has held permanent or visiting posts at numerous other institutions, in Ireland, France, Luxembourg, and the United States.

Having served as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict, in 2026 Amann testified on that subject before the UK Parliament’s Standing Group on Atrocities. Amann’s scholarship explores child and human rights, laws of peace and war, international criminal law, constitutionalism, and the legal history of women professionals at postwar trials in Nuremberg, Tokyo, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, where recent contributions include a study of efforts to secure justice for the forced residential schooling of Native American children.

Amann is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Vice President and Counsellor of the American Society of International Law, and former Coordinating Committee member of the European Society of International Law International Criminal Law Interest Group. Before entering academia, she clerked for US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and litigated transnational criminal cases as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in San Francisco. She holds a Dr hc in law from Universiteit Utrecht, a JD cum laude / Order of the Coif from Northwestern University, an MA in political science from UCLA, and a BS in journalism, with highest honors, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.