Rebel Greed and Postcolonial Governance: Neoliberal Accountings of the Past within Transitional Justice Processes in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone established two post-conflict institutions to address the crimes committed during its decade long civil war which officially ended in 2002. The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) was established to promote justice by trying “persons who bear the greatest responsibility” (Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, 2002, Article 1) for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, while the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) was mandated to offer a forum for victims and perpetrators alike to tell their wartime stories in an effort to promote reconciliation. How were women's expectations for justice and reconciliation met through the two transitional justice mechanisms? Although both institutions made notable attempts to include gender-specific crimes as an important component of their work, the all-important third ingredient in the “toolkit” of transitional justice – reparations and reforms – remained underutilized, and would have had a more positive impact on women's lives than the two institutions. This chapter highlights some of the achievements of the Court and Truth Commission, which were arguably superior to earlier transitional justice institutions, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) in addressing women's needs, but concludes that unless social, political, and economic improvements are made that empower women, women will remain vulnerable to sexual and other human rights abuses not only in times of war but in peace time as well.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) were created to deliver accountability for the atrocities committed during Rwanda's genocide of 1994 and Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s. The capacity of these courts, however, like other international criminal tribunals, is limited in terms of the number of persons they can prosecute. If most perpetrators evade justice, the ability of international tribunals to deliver accountability may be seriously undermined. To mitigate this risk, national justice systems should deal with the perpetrators who are not addressed by international tribunals. When national systems do not do so (or fail to do so effectively), international tribunals are well placed to encourage (or improve) national atrocity-related judicial proceedings, thereby increasing their chances of delivering accountability.This article assesses empirically the impact of the ICTR and SCSL on national atrocity-related judicial proceedings in their target countries, thus contributing to an overall assessment of these tribunals. The article also compares the national impact of the ‘pure international’ ICTR to that of the ‘hybrid’ SCSL and tries to identify features that affect the national impact of an international tribunal. Understanding the interactions between international and national justice systems, and the features that affect the national impact of international tribunals, is particularly important given the shift to ‘positive complementarity’ at the International Criminal Court.

This article investigates the impact of the educational recommendations made by Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) while exploring broader questions regarding the potential of truth commissions to contribute to post-conflict educational reconstruction and reform. The complex interrelationships between education and conflict in Sierra Leone's civil war are explored, as is the current situation of educational reconstruction in the country. Using data gathered during field research in Sierra Leone, the contribution of the SLTRC educational recommendations to identifying post-conflict educational needs and to the educational reconstruction process is assessed. While the article suggests that truth commissions present potential to contribute to post-conflict educational reconstruction, it also points to the limitations of this process in Sierra Leone.

ABSTRACTEducation is acknowledged as a component of transitional justice processes, yet details about how to implement education reform in postconflict societies are underexplored and politicized [King, Elisabeth. 2014. From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press]. Local and international actors often neglect the complicated nature of education reform in postconflict societies undergoing transitional justice processes [Jones, Briony. 2015. "Educating Citizens in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Experiences and Contradictions in Post-war Education Reform." In Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans, edited by Martina Fischer, and Olivera Simic, 193–208. New York: Routledge. Transitional Justice]. The role of the diaspora in transitional justice has been increasingly explored as a participatory transnational actor with influence and knowledge about local dynamics [Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2006. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Haider, Huma. 2008. “(Re)Imagining Coexistence: Striving for Sustainable Return, Reintegration and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ”International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (1): 91–113; Young, Laura, and Rosalyn Park. 2009.“ Engaging Diasporas in Truth Commissions: Lessons from the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission Diaspora Project.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (3): 341–361; Koinova, Maria, and Dženeta Karabegović. 2017.“ Diasporas and Transitional Justice: Transnational Activism from Local to Global Levels of Engagement.” Global Networks 17 (2): 212–233]. This article bridges academic literature about diaspora engagement and transitional justice, and education and transitional justice by incorporating the role of diaspora actors in post-conflict processes. Using empirical data from multi-sited field work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France, it examines diaspora initiatives which aim to influence local transitional justice processes through translocal community involvement in education and youth policy. It argues that diaspora initiatives can provide alternative and intermediate solutions to the status quo in their homeland, with some potential for contributing to transitional justice and reconciliation processes. Ultimately, diaspora initiatives need support from homeland institutions in order to forward transitional justice agendas in post-conflict societies.

This article reviews the book by Professor Charles C. Jalloh, <strong>The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone</strong>, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. In this book, the author examines the “hybrid” international/national criminal tribunal, known as the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which was created under a pathbreaking bilateral treaty between the United Nations (UN) and the country of Sierra Leone as a UN member state. Jalloh seeks to evaluate the contributions made by SCSL to the development of international criminal law. In particular, he assesses the scope and significance of SCSL legal contributions from its solutions to problems arising between its opening and the completion of its work in 2013, having to do with personal and temporal jurisdiction; gender crimes as crimes against humanity; recruitment of children as war crimes; head-of-state immunity; amnesty; and tensions between criminal tribunals and truth commissions. <strong>Keywords:</strong> ICTR; Kabbah, Ahmad Tejan; Liberia; Lomé Peace Agreement; Rome Statute; RUF; Sierra Leone civil war; Sierra Leonean law; SCSL appeals chamber, trial chambers, registrar's office, prosecutor's office, and defense office; Taylor, Charles; temporal jurisdiction; The Hague; Truth and Reconciliation Commission; United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Security Council, and Resolution 1315

This chapter examines the transitional justice processes that states adopt to redress the legacy of past human rights violations focusing on human rights trials and truth commissions. The cases explored challenge conventional wisdom by showing how human rights ideas and practices flow from the global south to the global north and not simply the reverse. Argentina is credited with helping to initiate the justice norm of individual criminal accountability; while the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission captured the global imagination, triggering the widespread use of truth commissions globally. The chapter also explores the first truth commission in the United States – the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Commonly states pursue multiple transitional justice processes or adapt their strategies as political opportunities change. Other themes explored include the debate between retributive justice and restorative justice, the role of the forensic sciences in documenting human rights violations including torture, and the role of memorials, like the Srebrenica Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, for preventing denialism.

The Nuremberg tribunal was the expression and the beginning of states' recognition of their duty to prosecute genocide and other gross human rights violations. It was a first step towards fulfillin...

This study investigated the role of mediation in grassroots transitional justice processes. The major aim of the study was to understand the role of mediation in transitional justice processes, ascertaining its effectiveness as a grassroots transitional justice mechanism and how its demand for use in transitional justice can be increased. The study was carried out using action research methodologies, with a mediation project carried out in the Makoni District of Manicaland in Zimbabwe. The mediation project involved community members addressing transitional-justice-related conflicts using mediation as a tool for conflict resolution. The mediators were provided with mediation skills through a training programme and their work was evaluated thrice to ascertain the role and impact of the mediation interventions on transitional-justicerelated conflicts. The project was termed Mediation for Everyday Transitional Justice because it was implemented in a natural community’s daily environment, by local people and for the local communities. The continuing failure of transitional justice mechanisms in Zimbabwe amid continued human rights violations justifies the undeniable value of this study. Zimbabwe’s past transitional justice efforts (since 1980, when the country became an independent republic) failed to build sustainable peace hence the country’s continued relapse into political and socio-economic turmoil. However, with appropriate transitional justice interventions that are built on grassroots-informed processes, sustainable peace is conceivable in Zimbabwe. Mediation, as an alternative dispute resolution process that is both persuasive and non-retributive, offers an interesting opportunity to the practice of transitional justice. The research concluded that the role of mediation in transitional justice is to facilitate truth telling, reparations, healing, and reconciliation among disputants without the need to use national-level transitional justice infrastructures. This means that, at the grassroots level, transitional justice processes can take place without waiting for the statist transitional justice approaches. However, in cases where the past human rights violations being addressed are tied to structural violence, driven from outside the community, local mediation processes may not be possible without the consent, cooperation, and willingness of those who sustain such conflicts. In addition, mediation cannot play any significant role in enabling prosecutorial justice, memorialisation, and institutional reforms at the grassroots level. Prosecutorial justice cannot be achieved because perpetrators can withdraw quickly when possibilities exist to be held criminally accountable for past human rights abuses. Institutional reforms also require changing governance policies and practices which are issues beyond the control of specific local communities. The study also observed that mediation is an effective tool for grassroots transitional justice issues because it is efficient, it saves time and financial resources, and it can be undertaken by local actors. To increase its demand and use in transitional justice processes at the grassroots level, these is a need to increase communities’ awareness of the importance of mediation in transitional justice, provide mediation-skills capacity-development interventions to potential mediators, and enhance the agency of various mediation actors at the grassroots levels.

Embedded in transitional justice processes is an implicit reference to the production of collective memory and history. This article aims to study how memory initiatives become a crucial component of truth-seeking and reparations processes. The article examines South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the creation of collective memory through symbolic reparations of history revision in education. The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended a set of symbolic reparations to the state, including history rectification reflective of the truth on human rights violations. Using political discourse analysis, this study compares the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report to the 2016 national history textbook. The article finds that the language of human rights in state sponsored history revisions contests the findings of the truth commission. And in doing so, this analysis argues for the need to reevaluate the government-initiated memory politics even in a democratic state that instituted numerous truth commissions and prosecuted former heads of state.

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World by Carrie Booth Walling Rebecca Sanders (bio) Carrie Booth Walling, Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World (Routledge 2022), ISBN 9780367902124, 194 pages. Carrie Booth Walling’s Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to international human rights. Geared primarily towards university students, but also useful for scholars, professionals, and activists seeking to orient themselves, the book offers six thematic chapters and a human rights advocacy toolkit. Walling frames the pursuit of human rights as an active political project and guides readers through major issue areas, highlighting human rights deficits and violations, relevant international legal standards, and activist campaigns for change. Interspersed throughout the text, Walling profiles a diverse range of human rights campaigners, both widely and lesser known (e.g. Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, Indigenous Mexican Otomi-Toltec climate activist Xiye Bastida, and forensic physician Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı), as well as several human rights campaigns and initiatives (e.g. the UN’s Free and Equal Campaign for LGBTI rights, the Syrian White Helmets’ humanitarian rescue mission, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ farmworker advocacy in Florida), giving a face to human rights advocacy. This effort to continually link broad human rights principles back to the [End Page 352] people and processes that demand and implement rights, or as Walling frames it, the lived experience of human rights, is one of the major strengths of the book. The thematic chapters introduce readers to inter-related human rights challenges and then provide in depth illustrative case studies from around the world, all of which are well-documented in thorough endnotes. For instance, Chapter 2 on equality and non-discrimination examines systemic anti-Black racism in the US criminal justice system and Chinese repression and forced assimilation of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority under the guise of counterterrorism. Chapter 3 on the interdependence of human rights invokes Michael Goodhart’s “negative interdependence” framework to explore the intersections of class, racial, and political deprivations and exclusions that fueled the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Later, the chapter shifts to review the Islamic State’s sexual violence against Yazidi women and girls, examining overlapping vectors of gendered, religious, and ethnic insecurity. International crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are analyzed in Chapter 4, which covers a range of cases and developments including the Rwandan genocide, the development of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, RUF atrocities in Sierra Leone, and grotesque war crimes in Syria. Chapter 5 on justice and reconciliation explores a variety of models of transitional justice including trials, truth commissions, apologies, memorialization, and reparations and introduces readers to concepts of retributive and restorative justices. Case studies include post-dictatorship trials in Argentina, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and less conventionally, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission—an unofficial community-led initiative to shed light on the 1979 massacre of anti-racist activists perpetrated by white supremacists in Greensboro, North Carolina. This latter case, along with aforementioned case studies on US criminal justice and the Flint water crisis, make the text especially useful for American students, who often struggle to critically connect domestic politics with international human rights challenges. The final two chapters examine mechanisms of human rights adoption, monitoring, and implementation. Chapter 6 reviews patterns and practices of civil society mobilization and the dynamics of Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s “transnational advocacy networks,” interspersed with numerous examples such as the work of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo or Human Rights Watch. The chapter goes on to explain the institutional international human rights machinery including the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, Special Procedures, and Treaty Bodies. Students can also download a supplemental seven-page file from the Routledge website which includes a list of international and regional treaties and legal instruments, trials, tribunals, and investigative bodies, and a range of human rights non-governmental organizations and journals, many of which include direct hyperlinks...

Ten years since the end of its 11-year civil war, Sierra Leone has become an important case study for students and practitioners of transitional justice (TJ). The parallel establishment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) brought new attention to the merits of restorative and retributive approaches operating simultaneously. While William Schabas argues that Sierra Leone is a successful model of the 'two-track approach', Sierra Leone has also become the focus of a large critical literature, which questions the legitimacy of external practices and ideas.2 Growing concerns in Sierra Leone that international transitional justice undermined internal restorative justice and communal structures have generated intense debates over what a comprehensive TJ process should entail. These debates tie into a politics of legitimacy between international and national justice mechanisms. Members of Sierra Leonean civil society — including members of the TRC — have argued that the international influence on TJ practices has sidelined local culture, civil society and authority structures. While traditional practices of reintegration preceded the TRC in some communities, criticisms of the TRC also led to the rise of new actors and grassroots TJ processes within the country.

The third wave of democratization has meant the end of autocratic rule and oppressive state-sponsored practices in many countries around the world. Yet the transition from authoritarianism and state-sponsored terror to more open and participatory societies has its own imperatives. After autocratic rule and protracted conflicts, it is necessary to heal the wounds caused by years, sometimes decades, of mistrust, fear, and violence. Systematic violations of human rights, in the form of oppression, physical and psychological violence, and death, leave lasting individual and collective wounds. Transitional (or restorative) justice is designed to address and (hopefully) mitigate such legacies left by the previous regime. In doing so, it draws on a variety of instruments: criminal prosecutions, special tribunals, amnesties, apologies, memorials, lustrations, and truth commissions (TCs), among others. The end of the Cold War also gave a new impetus to international criminal justice. Special tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, and for Sierra Leone were established, as was, most prominently, the International Criminal Court, originated in the 1999 Rome Treaty and based in The Hague. For many, this portends a major shift in international relations, one in which the traditional, Westphalian, and sovereignty-centered international system gives way to another, based on more porous units, in which individual and human rights have more sway and human rights abuses trigger a more proactive international reaction. In turn, these developments have given rise to a whole new field of study: transitional justice. This is an interdisciplinary field in which political science, law, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, theology, and other disciplines converge. Not surprisingly, since transitional justice emerges as a result of the developments described above, it is, much like democratization and political transitions, also marked by contingency and paradox. Transitions are fluid and political action and the uses of the law find themselves under a different set of rules than under ordinary circumstances. Grasping the transformative opportunities presented by the conjuncture becomes a key test of political leadership. (1) Truth commissions have emerged as a popular tool of transitional justice, especially in cases where a delicate balance between the extant remnants of the previous regime coexist with the new dispensation. (2) TCs have come to the fore because of their flexibility, their open-endedness, and their ability to act as a bridge of sorts between an evil past and a democratic present, thus laying the foundations for a future society at peace with itself. At first, transitional justice was mainly concerned with transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule. However, after the large number of internal conflicts that arose in the post-Cold War era, it has also been applied within the wider panoply of nation- and peacebuilding instruments following the end of a war or conflict. This has been especially true for Africa. Some transitional justice tools, like TCs, have shown to be so prevalent and useful for a variety of reasons that they are now deployed in advanced Western democracies, like Canada, to investigate historical human rights abuses as well as to investigate the conditions that led to the breakdown of democracy, as happened with the TC set up in Honduras after the June 2009-January 2010 crisis. Especially in Latin America and Africa, TCs as well as truth and reconciliation commissions have been deployed to come to terms with past injustices while rebuilding trust in government and among social groups, although they have also been deployed in Asia, Europe, and North America. (3) While they share a number of common features, TCs must reflect local specificities to address the crimes of the past amidst the fluid, uncertain, and challenging conditions that are the hallmark of democratic transitions. …

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines how multifarious levels of division among victim constituencies have shaped legal and non-legal transitional justice responses to human rights violations. It submits that this division has caused such responses to operate in accordance with the notion of being a ‘victim of’ rather than that of simply being a victim of human rights abuse per se. Expanding from this position, it proffers the theoretical viewpoint that transitional justice responses are premised on the nuanced typologies of being a victim of a particular perpetrator or being a victim of a particular harm or being a victim of particular circumstances. When determining which victims to offer redress to, which victimisers to punish and which harms to repair, these approaches have by necessity fallen back on hierarchies that favour certain victims and harms above others. This process of hierarchisation is multi-layered and involves interplay between ideological, gendered and class-based factors that place certain victims outside the reach of transitional justice discourses and processes. The exclusion of these victims, the article argues, creates an invisibilised category of victims of the peace that fail to benefit from transitional justice processes that struggle to deal with the complexity their situations present.

Highlighting the place and role of women in transitional justice processes draws attention to two main aspects: the need for a holistic approach to transitional justice processes, and paying attention to the sensitive nature of gender-based violence in the whole cycle of truth commissions from articulation of the mandate of the commission, composition of the commissioners, categorisation of crimes, to the writing and implementation of the final report. A feminist advocacy approach to transitional justice is framed under a critical feminist strategy that draws attention to diverse forms of human rights violations against women in situations of conflict; structures of exclusion of women�s concerns; the agency and presence of women in truth commission processes. Hence, discourse on gendering transitional justice processes has recently emerged, especially given that women have been targeted in conflict situations, giving rise to sexual and gender-based violence, and indiscriminate killing of women despite their non-combatant role. This article discusses the extent of marginalisation of cases of women�s gross human rights violations in truth commission processes, while acknowledging positive attempts made so far, through critical feminism, to include women�s concerns in these processes.

This book considers the efficacy of transitional justice mechanisms in response to corporate human rights abuses. Corporations and other business enterprises often operate in countries affected by conflict or repressive regimes. As such, they may become involved in human rights violations and crimes under international law ‒ either as the main perpetrators or as accomplices by aiding and abetting government actors. Transitional justice mechanisms, such as trials, truth commissions, and reparations, have usually focused on abuses by state authorities or by non-state actors directly connected to the state, such as paramilitary groups. Innovative transitional justice mechanisms have, however, now started to address corporate accountability for human rights abuses and crimes under international law and have attempted to provide redress for victims. This book analyzes this development, assessing how transitional justice can provide remedies for corporate human rights abuses and crimes under international law. Canvassing a broad range of literature relating to international criminal law mechanisms, regional human rights systems, domestic courts, truth and reconciliation commissions, and land restitution programmes, this book evaluates the limitations and potential of each mechanism. Acknowledging the limited extent to which transitional justice has been able to effectively tackle the role of corporations in human rights violations and international crimes, this book nevertheless points the way towards greater engagement with corporate accountability as part of transitional justice. A valuable contribution to the literature on transitional justice and on business and human rights, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers and PhD students in these areas, as well as lawyers and other practitioners working on corporate accountability and transitional justice.