Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

Sofia Stolk: 0:00  There is something about really experiencing it for yourself or visiting and an energy that lingers in places that is really felt and that is important for people. 

[INTRO MUSIC]

00:12  No one can act with impunity. These are crimes that are beyond the pale. We are talking about human beings, we’re not talking about numbers. We need a court that’s as simple as that.

00:24  This is Asymmetrical Haircuts, Your International Justice Podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg. All rise. 

Janet: 00:32  Hi, Steph.

Stephanie: 00:33  Hi, Janet.

Janet: 00:34  Should we go and get an ice cream, Steph, and should we go and hang out together?

Stephanie: 00:38  You know, I love to have ice cream and hang out together. Can we see some interesting stuff in the meantime?

Janet: 00:43  Well, we could go to the Peace Palace, the home of the International Court of Justice.

Stephanie: 00:48  Well, and if you’re into court, you could go into the ICC in the dunes near the beach and a nice cool breeze, but there’s not as nice an ice cream stand, I have to say. Or, you know, we could go to my favorite hangout, which is the former ICTY, and try to figure out what’s going to happen to that building now that the Dutch didn’t win the bid for the European Customs Agency. And from there, we can look at Eurojust and Europol and even the Hague Conference on Private Law. What are we doing that we’re going to go sightseeing with me?

Janet: 01:19  Well, I think you’ve guessed it since you’ve enumerated so many interesting sites. We are, in fact, legal sightseeing, at least. That’s what I think that legal sightseeing is, having an ice cream and then hanging out together with some nice people where legal stuff is happening, has happened, but what do I know? So, to tell us more and explain what it’s really all about, we have Sofia Stolk. Hi, Sofia.

Sofia Stolk: 01:42  Hi.

Stephanie: 01:43  Sofia is Assistant Professor in International Law at Vrije University in Amsterdam, and she is an Associate Fellow at the Asser Institute. And with Sofia here is Renske Vos, and she is Assistant Professor in International Law at VU in Amsterdam. Hi, Renske.

Renske Vos: 01:58  Hi there. Nice to meet you.

Stephanie: 01:59  So, you guys have made a career out of hanging out and eating ice cream where famous cases have been heard?

Sofia Stolk: 02:06  Basically, yes.

Stephanie: 02:08  That is a great scam.

Renske Vos: 02:10  It is. It is. And indeed, the ice cream in front of the Peace Palace is a very well-started tour for us.

Stephanie: 02:19  I was going to say, because there’s not a lot of food options, chill options at other courts than famously.

Renske Vos: 02:26  No, the ICC does have a cafeteria. If you go inside, you can join, and there is actually also ice cream in the cafeteria.

Stephanie: 02:36  So, next time you’re there… I’ve never tried the ice cream in the cafeteria at the ICC. I’m always there jonesing for coffee, probably.

Janet: 02:44  Come on, Steph, let’s get off the food. What actually is legal sightseeing? Sofia, maybe you can, you know, tell us. I got this quote from your website about it: “Spectacular yet mundane practice.” Yeah, I mean, mundane, I agree. Spectacular. Depends on the courts. You know, what is it? Thank you. 

Sofia Stolk: 03:02  Yeah, legal sightseeing. So, we have been thinking about what is it exactly, and it’s a lot of things. So, it’s definitely what you just mentioned. So, watching courts, eating ice cream, checking out the spaces. But we see it broader as the encounter between international law and the public. So, all the instances where international law meets the people in different ways. So, it’s courts, but also a stroopwafel tin. So, a cookie jar with the peace letters on it. It’s a peace run. It’s objects. It’s a towel with the EULEX logo. It’s a lot of things where we see mundane things, but also spectacularizing international law for the public.

Stephanie: 03:49  They’ve changed. I think the ICJ has recently really upped their gift store game. And there’s like scarves with motifs of the Japanese paintings and stuff. They really, for legal geeks like us, that’s the place to go gift shopping if you want. But we wanted to know, is there really a difference between the professional and the public in how these spaces interact?

Renske Vos: 04:15  I think part of the fun with legal sightseeing is that also, as someone with a professional interest in international law, legal sightseeing does bring out, again, that kind of wayfaring tourist attitude to this site or to this subject that we think we know well. And that has been a very nice way of re-familiarizing or renewing that interest that we have in international law, precisely because we are not maybe that different from other tourists visiting the sites. I spoke recently with a colleague, and she specializes in environmental law and climate change justice, and we together watched the ICJ advisory opinion decision, which was live broadcast on a large screen outside of the Peace Palace. And we were there, and there were many people watching, including many activists, many young people, maybe students and us. And she said, yeah, as an international lawyer, I did hear very clearly also the gaps and omissions in the advisory opinion, whereas around us, the activists were more hearing confirmation and celebrating. And so she said, yeah, I did experience it differently, but at the same time, we were all there together, genuinely interested in what was happening.

Janet: 05:37  But do you find that people kind of get an interest? What I noticed for us in our podcast was that particularly around Israel-Palestine, which really engaged a lot of people, we kind of doubled our numbers of downloads every month because people were so engaged with, you know, will international law essentially solve this in some form. But then we’ve seen that decline gradually because people do get more kind of depressed by the slowness, by the mundanity of it, by the language, that it can be quite sort of distancing, the language of what’s going on there. You know, how do you find that the public engages?

Sofia Stolk: 06:22  Yeah, I think what is interesting for legal sightseeing to observe nowadays is that where we see colleagues really talking about the death of international law and, yeah, really having this apocalyptic idea about law, you see that the public actually moves into the other direction. So there’s really some sort of renewed hope and faith in international law. People want to know that you have experienced that, but also people who don’t really know still engage and are present. At the same time, I think there are different ways of legal sightseeing. We’ve also encountered people who are at the Peace Palace and think that it’s the Royal Palace or that it’s a Disney castle. And people come in with different expectations and they go away with different things. So that’s also for us part of our interest, that people engage with international law without maybe knowing it. But in doing so, they also have a role in shaping what international law is and how it is legitimized. And I think that for us also this space of ambiguity where we don’t know, is this law, how is it law, how do people come in, how do people get out? That’s the tension where we’re looking for.

Stephanie: 07:35  And do you guys also do research on what the public thinks of when they visit these things? And what do kind of quote unquote regular people, and I mean like not the law nerds like me, get out of it. I’m thinking of, I went to visit the UN headquarters when I was like 19, and I think I bought a copy, you know, they have these tiny little copies of the UN Charter. So I got that one and I found it recently when I was cleaning up stuff and thought, why did 19-year-old me want to have this UN Charter? Because I wasn’t doing anything that would really put me on this path. But I thought, oh, I guess I was interested in this in some way enough to buy this and keep it. And then I started doing all this international law stuff and the UN Charter gets mentioned all the time. So now it’s back on my bookshelf. But what do kind of people get out of this?

Sofia Stolk: 08:29  We haven’t done like large-scale interviews, but we have done interviews at, for example, the Peace Palace grounds. Also colleagues of ours have helped us with that. And it’s so eclectic. So it’s people complaining about the ice cream, that there’s no vanilla ice cream, to people who come especially from India to see the ICJ and to really touch it. A lot of people complain that you cannot get inside because of course you can only do the audio tour. People who are waiting for a job interview and accidentally ended up there. So it’s many different things. I think people generally are interested and it’s not so far from their worlds as we may think, but not in a way that we experience it. But they are interested in human rights and those things. I mean, they’re very much in people’s lives. And I think that’s also what we want to uncover. So what is it then?

Stephanie: 09:30  When I have a lot of people from the former Balkans visit me, they always want to see the prison because they like to see where, quote unquote, the bad guy is locked up. And I’ve noticed this also with people now from the Philippines. They want to see where, quote unquote, the bad guy is locked up, and they’re not so interested in the court, but much more in the prison. Does visiting the prison also fit your definition of legal sightseeing, Renske?

Renske Vos: 09:55  I would definitely. Well, we anyway have a very broad definition of legal sightseeing. But yes, and maybe the prison is just the other side of the coin of the justice system as well. And in some way, I don’t know, is it more spectacular or more mundane? But I think it definitely fits with that interest in justice that people have.

Janet: 10:20  And I’m wondering about what you also described about the ways of doing it. Again, I got this collaging, drawing and photography. This is all very visual recording of things. Here in Vilnius, I went to an exhibition by a friend of mine yesterday. And again, her discussion of the exhibition is about the nature of images and what images tell you about particular situations that she was trying to capture. So I’m wondering if that’s part of the depth, is engaging with a community who are thinking about images rather than thinking about international law and thinking about representation rather than about international law. Is that part of what it’s about?

Renske Vos: 11:01  Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. So legal sightseeing is about how international law is presented to the public. And so these are two important components. But a third very critical component is art and visuality, both in the way that artists often, we say, act like a mediator in the encounter between the two, but also in the way that art and artists also are an independent commentator on international law and often sometimes very disruptive and critical or cynical, and bringing out, you know, the tensions and the obvious clash between politics and law, or making insightful the nuances within law or within the experience of injustice, maybe of communities or of particular societal issues. And also sometimes as a more positive outlet also for experiences that maybe victims have. So there’s of course also a huge research on art in transitional justice contexts. We don’t necessarily look at it specifically, but we’ve been super interested in how art is, you know, in such multifaceted ways, so, so interesting in really opening up your perspective on international law and its public life.

Sofia Stolk: 12:25  And also I think it’s important that for us legal sightseeing is a phenomenon that we study, but also very much a method of studying. So we take groups on tours and we let them draw what they see, purposefully slowing down, activating looking, feeling, other senses to also allow yourself to change the pace and to change perspective and to really look at what you thought you knew was there. And we work with collaging a lot to have people sit on a table and physically touch materials and paste and use, like, the glue. And they always say, I haven’t done this since kindergarten. This is a lot of fun. I cannot draw, but they still do it. And then conversations are held, very informal, and people talk about their own experiences with international law. New connections are made. And we think this is really powerful as a method to do with students, with colleagues, with non-experts in international law.

Stephanie: 13:31  I was going to say, which kind of groups do you take? Do they apply for this, or are you just kind of—I don’t want to say catfishing on the internet—but kind of being like, anyone who will sign up for this will do? Or are you approaching specific groups, thinking that it would be interesting to see what their perspective is?

Sofia Stolk: 13:47  Well, we’ve been doing it at conferences with colleagues to get them out of the conference mode, with students a lot, but really basically anyone. Yes.

Stephanie: 13:58  Is there a particular community that you kind of tap into to share this passion with outside of, I guess, colleagues and students? I don’t want to say willing victims, but I mean, obviously students and colleagues are the kind of people who would be interested in that. Is there a group or a community beyond that? Do you have, like, I don’t know, collaging artists?

Sofia Stolk: 14:23  Yes.

Renske Vos: 14:24  Artists. And also the NGO world has been a great partner. I mean, you, of course, partner for years with the Movies That Matter Festival, the Human Rights Documentary Film Festival here in The Hague. We’ve worked together with many artists, visual as well as artists in music, architects. Yeah.

Stephanie: 14:46  I wanted to ask, is there anything that you notice about the spaces? And I think then more about the buildings. And I have lots of opinions about the way that court buildings are. But I wonder what you can say about kind of the architecture or the visual presentation of court buildings, let’s say, in The Hague, but also more generally.

Sofia Stolk: 15:18  Well, then we have to plug our other book. So we just finalized an edited volume for you on international law and architecture, because there’s so much to say and people do have opinions. And it’s not only about courthouses, but I think it’s much bigger than that. So there are so many chapters that are worth reading. But yeah, that, I think, is one of our earlier interests. So one of the first pieces we wrote together was on the architecture of the ICC, which is sort of my go-to for my research. And let’s go on the EU quarter in Brussels and the different buildings there and how these buildings speak to the public. But also, yeah, how it’s really conflicting messages of sort of, if you read the ICC brief for the architects for their building, these are big words, like the building had to transpire openness, justice, peace, whatever, like every big word you can think of. And then it’s, of course, highly securitized. So the contrast is huge. And for people, it looks like—some people say it’s like an office building; others, like there’s this sort of water surrounding it, like this castle moat. We had an artist, a very nice young artist, who graduated from the Royal Academy last year. And she made this photo series of the ICC. And she photographed the coffee stains on the floor and the very lost security cameras. It’s beautiful.

Stephanie: 16:46  I absolutely need to see this. I probably would buy half of the work.

Sofia Stolk: 16:50  It’s beautiful. And it’s really bringing back the humanity in the building and also showing this is a place where people work, but also really, I don’t know, it’s beautiful.

Stephanie: 16:59  It’s really my big rant, sorry, on the ICC, aside from the hexagonal windows and all that, and lots of glass because it has to show transparency, is that kind of IKEA wood panelling in the courtrooms where they love to be like, yes, it’s international justice, but also it can’t cost too much. And the way we project that it costs a lot of money, but the way that we somehow project that it is not super expensive if we have all this kind of blonde wood everywhere and it looks like it’s parqueted everywhere. And I always wonder, I understand that idea, and they’re projecting a certain image, but the moment you get somebody having the ICC on the big screen, especially in the big Hollywood movies, the buildings they pick to kind of model the ICC are always much more like the Peace Palace than the kind of glass and transparent behemoth that the ICC is. And I wonder what that says about what you make these court buildings for. Are they made for the politicians who have to decide what to pay for them, or are they made for the public who like to watch these grandiose court buildings?

Renske Vos: 18:11  Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, who was it that said justice needs to be seen to be done, right? We were, in doing this edited volume on international law and architecture with Miriam Bak McKenna, we were just so overwhelmed by the responses we received and the ways in which architecture of buildings or law’s physical spaces, the ways in which it speaks to the imagination. Like, indeed, you mentioned the UN Headquarters in New York. It’s an icon of itself. It’s a top tourist destination. And it’s also, in some ways, disappointing of this wood-panelling fantasy in its quite modernist outlook. And I think this maybe sense of surprise that we can feel when we then see the real thing is not wood panelling, etc., is also a very nice indicator of what are our expectations and why are we surprised at this? And what sort of images do we hold in mind when we think of justice? And what does it tell us about what we expect from international law or what we wish it to be?

Sofia Stolk: 19:26  And it says something about the time as well, because if you read back the newspapers in the Netherlands when the Peace Palace was built, people were like, oh, this ugly old-fashioned building. Why do we have it here? Architects are really unhappy with the project. And that’s the same with the ICC. People were like, oh, it’s a really ugly building. So, yeah, it’s also saying something about what has formed in our heads as the image of international law.

Janet: 19:52  I’m going to pull us back to sightseeing to start with. Maybe we’ll come back to architecture again. This word “sightseeing” kind of worried me as well, because it feels like quite a privileged term. It’s when you have money and space to go and to travel and you go for holiday purposes, that’s when you sightsee. And I wondered to what extent it’s actually really rather a privileged perspective and essentially a white one from the Global North, where it’s our luxury and it doesn’t actually mean that much to victims and survivors of atrocities worldwide. How do you engage with that kind of critique of what it is that you’re up to?

Renske Vos: 20:39  Well, we live in The Hague, the city of peace and justice. So we are based in the Global North. And because of that, also most of the encounters we have with international law are here. What I think is genuinely one of the best parts about doing the Legal Sightseeing Project is the responses we’ve received from colleagues, fellow legal sightseers, really from all over, where people are genuinely always responding with, “Ah, I have this experience,” or “I did this,” or that. And it turns out, yeah, I think by now I can say, I think legal sightseeing is really a global phenomenon that is not only something that we have here in the Global North, but these sites, these interests, they really exist almost everywhere, maybe everywhere.

Janet: 21:31  Yeah, maybe I’m expressing a kind of neocolonial perspective as well, suggesting that only rich white people like me have the time and the opportunity to do things. And in fact, everybody’s interested. I don’t know.

Sofia Stolk: 21:43  It’s also, I mean, legal sightseeing, the word is a sort of frivolous and fun word also to attract. It’s also, in that way, trying to express a fun element. But if we look at what we see as legal sightseeing, it’s also memorials. It’s also very much places where people go to remember and to speak out. And we really use this art, like we said, as a way of including voices that cannot be expressed within the more traditional confines of doctrine. So we think this is, yeah, maybe exactly the kind of things that allow different voices to come forward. We have colleagues in Indonesia who are doing legal sightseeing. We have colleagues in Vietnam, and they’re sending us things. And yeah, it’s really in that way very—the term legal sightseeing also sparks joy everywhere in that sense. So I think we allow it to be also broad in that way.

Renske Vos: 22:48  But I do think that it is really a luxury to be able to do research from a place of fun and curiosity. And that is maybe, in fact, also a position of privilege to hold, to have that be what inspires you, as opposed to maybe a sense of anger or cynicism or frustration or injustice. That is privileged. At the same time, as we also say in our book, a sense of fun is not per se without politics or punch. So a sense of humor can also be disarming, and it can also be revealing. And we hope to go with that very much. I also think it’s a huge luxury that we’ve experienced to do this kind of research in an institutional context that supports us. So we are so happy to be in a research group at VU, headed by Wouter Werner, that has always supported and understood our work and has—our colleagues have always thought along with us. And that is, I think, that kind of generative collaboration and the generosity of our colleagues, that is really what has made this project.

Stephanie: 23:57  I’m also thinking there’s now the ubiquity of the smartphone and the phone that takes pictures. And, Janet, you say it is kind of a uniquely Northern privilege to be able to legal sightsee, but I have yet to meet a victim or an advocacy group that has made it to The Hague to have their case heard who do not take a group picture in front of whatever court they’re going to. The Mothers of Srebrenica did it in front of the ICTY. The Lebanese victims did it in front of that horrible weird office building in Leidschendam, where it is. This is a place, it’s an occasion to memorialize for people. And if they have—you know, some buildings are nicer than others—but, you know, now if I cycle past the ICJ, even on a calm day, there are people taking pictures of themselves. It’s also because it’s a pretty building, but, you know, everybody who kind of makes it to The Hague as somebody who was victimized by a war tends to also gravitate towards these institutions and take pictures of being there. I can’t speak for—I mean, the ICC keeps their victims very locked up. You don’t get to interact with them. But I also run into a lot of people who are not going into the ICC to visit the visitor centre or whatever, but they take pictures of the sign outside that says ICC.

Sofia Stolk: 25:21  Yeah. And I think it’s also, of course, very dangerous to reduce victims to their victimhood and they don’t have fun anymore. That would be really ridiculous. But those are the ICC outreach projects. We have photos of football matches organized by the ICC with people in shirts saying ICC. And I mean, so this is for us also part of the legal sightseeing, right? It’s not only visiting the building.

Stephanie: 25:45  I would buy the hell out of an ICC football shirt. They need to have a shop at the ICC. Now I want the ICC football shirt.

Renske Vos: 25:54  We go into, in our book, this idea of being there where it happens, where it has happened, and that there is some energy going out of this experience, or there is some pull for people to want to visit that place and to be there. And that is some feeling that cannot easily be replaced also by maybe visiting online or participating online, even though there is a huge deal of online virtual participation, or even checking out, of course, buildings on Google Street View. But yeah, there is something about really experiencing it for yourself or visiting, and an energy that lingers in places that is really felt and that is important for people.

Stephanie: 26:39  I’m one of those people who studied history and went to Rome on the school trip and was really excited to touch the part of the stones that, you know, the people have.

Janet: 26:52  Touching is a thing, yeah. I too have touched a variety of stones in a variety of places. And yes, I too get my photo taken outside the most important spots and I too visit all prisons. So, you know, I count myself as part of your community. I just wanted to put the questions just to make sure that we understand what we’re talking about. I wanted just to wrap up by asking whether there’s something that we haven’t managed to ask you about this that you wanted to have a chance to say.

Sofia Stolk: 27:26  I think that for us, in bringing out the Legal Sightseeing book and celebrating this anniversary, what really stood out for us was how it was also a celebration of friendship with each other and with our colleagues everywhere around the world. And that we came to realize how important this also is to academic research and to international law maybe. And that it’s maybe—I guess you recognize it—how friendships really also are such an important part of what we do. So maybe that’s something to end with.

Stephanie: 28:00  Renske, is there anything that you wanted to say? You can’t really go a different direction now and be like, “For me the friendship isn’t really that important.”

Renske Vos: 28:08  No, no, no, this is like a very substantive point here. Oh yeah, maybe I should have done that, sorry. Well, there are such nice words to close on, so I hesitate to add, but I think if there was one thing, we’ve spoken now about, you know, what does the public get out of legal sightseeing, but I think there’s also a question of what does international law learn from the public. And I think the public is actually a very serious constituency of international law, and one that many of the courts and institutions also seek to enter into dialogue with. And as academics we can be maybe either easily dismissive of the public or not take them fully seriously. But I think the creativity and the kind of also sometimes relaxed attitudes and the other and genuinely concerned and engaged attitude of the tourists can be also really a nice source of inspiration and of renewal for international law. And international law as a discipline now, I think, is looking for that, right? So how does international law stay relevant in the future or even the present? And maybe, for example, the way that the public is not at all concerned with their own lack of international legal personality, but just wants to make suggestions and be involved and be heard. I think that is something we can really learn from, like how to diversify the actors that we take seriously, how to really hear very different voices and very different ideas. And yeah, maybe some ideas are terrible ideas. Maybe there are also some very good ones amongst them. So I think international law could learn a lot from publics, take them much more seriously as a constituency of international law.

Stephanie: 29:56  This reminds me of a thing that I had an editor once tell me that I wrote this story and I thought it was very well explained, and they were like, oh, I don’t understand this. And I was kind of like, well, you just don’t understand what I’m writing about. But he went, well, if I don’t understand it, large chances that your public will also not understand you.

And I always think about this when I have the judges tell me, like, the verdict speaks for itself, or the ruling speaks for itself. And it’s like, no, it really doesn’t. And if I have trouble with these things, and I’m so into it, then the public is going to have more potential trouble with it.

And that is not the audience for international law. Often, it’s people who know a lot about international law, when maybe the audience you should look for is the people who don’t necessarily are super knowledgeable, but who do want to indeed engage and deal with it.

Janet: 30:56  So, our other question just to end with is, apart from your books, of course, and maybe your blog site as well, and we’ll definitely link to all of those, but you can mention anything you want. Is there anything else that you’d like to recommend to the audience? We’re looking for books or films or podcasts, either on brand or what you use to get away from this stuff.

Sofia Stolk: 31:19 We also teach film and international law at VU, and the one film that I keep coming back to in the past years is Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat. And for my work for Movies Don’t Matter, I’ve seen so many documentaries, so I usually don’t want to see documentaries anymore, because I just want fiction. But that one is amazing, because I think their music is doing so much work, and it’s very long.

It’s three hours, and it sort of sets the whole geopolitical landscape around independence, the fight for independence in Africa, and also how jazz was used by the US government to win souls, but then also how jazz played an important role in the US itself for the civil rights movement. And it’s so well edited, and it’s completely based on historical archival materials, and it’s filled with music, and you just feel the political power of the music and of editing.

And it’s a film like no other films I’ve seen in many, many years. So that’s my recommendation.

Stephanie: 32:29 Oh, that’s gonna go on the list. When you say Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat, I hark back to the two years that I spent in Dakar doing West Africa.

There were lots of coups, because it had Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, I don’t remember. But what always happened is that at some point, the general news would get yanked, and they would play either folk music or kind of marching music. And then at some point, these soldiers would come on and say, you know, we took over, and we are establishing a government of national calm or whatever. But there would always be some kind of national music that was put on to kind of calm the nerves before the soldiers would walk out with usually some elaborate flower pieces on a table in front of them and declare that they’re gonna restore order in the country. But jazz sounds a lot better.

Renske Vos: 33:23 Wow. I was just thinking of, I hope it’s still on, but we recently visited an exhibition in Rotterdam by Anna Tsing, the author of the academic bestseller The Mushroom at the End of the World. She made an incredible exhibition about fungi networks in various, various ways. And it was just so beautifully artistically done and also of itself, but also as a way of how to translate your academic research into an art exhibition. I think that is so innovative and so important and something I wish more people would do so well. So if it’s still on, I highly recommend visiting this exhibition.

Stephanie: 34:10 Oh, that sounds wonderful. I’m very into fungi networks since I listened to a Radiolab episode about the wood wide web. And in the Netherlands, we have some amazing researchers who do this research into the fungi network, including the sister-in-law of my boss at Reuters, Toby Kirsch, who is like one of the world-leading people who investigates this. So this is an amazing thing, but it’s also amazing if you manage to translate this thing that you research into indeed art or a general public in that way. So thank you for that recommendation. I’m going to look out for that.

Janet: 34:49 Yeah, I’ve looked both of them up and I’ve put the links in the script and the exhibition is still on until sometime in August. So thank you so much to both of you for schlepping into Humanity Hub to have a chat to us there. It’s really, really nice when we get to see people in person. Of course, I’m still online at the moment, but soon I will be in person back in the Netherlands and it just makes such a difference. I can hear you guys at the other end of the Zoom laughing away and I’m over here, but okay, it sounds great. So thank you so much for wrapping up our July for us before we take a break in August.

Stephanie: 35:31 Well, yeah, thank you for having us.

Sofia Stolk: 35:32 Enjoy summer. You know what to do now. You go sightseeing.

Stephanie: 35:36 Exactly. I was always thinking if everything goes wrong, I will start a tea shop in Ireland, and now I’m thinking we need an ice cream van at the ICC, but then I would still only be doing ICC, so probably it’s not good for my mental health. Ice cream is good for your mental health. It’s back to the tea shop in Ireland, I think. All right. Thank you so much and bye-bye.

Janet: 36:01 Just to say that if you are enjoying this podcast and you’d like to give us a bit of extra support, you can head over to our support us page where you can give us a tip or you can follow us on Patreon and you can download our newsletter, and we really appreciate everybody who gives us a bit of extra support there.

Outro: 36:44 Asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating, and spread the word.

[OUTRO TUNE]

This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg in partnership with the Hague Humanity Hub. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.

Stay safe and enjoy your day.