The Role of the Arts in Cambodia’s Transitional Justice Process

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.

Reflecting on the case study of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), this article asks how transitional justice (TJ) processes account for the complexity of victimhood in political violence and mass atrocity. It speaks to the critical scholarship which questions the use of simplistic dichotomies of (innocent) victims versus (guilty) perpetrators in TJ processes. Findings from empirical, qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2013 and 2014 show that both inclusion and exclusion dynamics towards complex political victims take place at the ECCC. Whilst most critical scholarship questions the exclusion of complex political victims from TJ processes, this article highlights the limitations and challenges of both the inclusion and the exclusion of such victims. It argues that the complexity of victimhood in contexts of mass atrocity poses vexing questions to TJ scholars and practitioners that have yet to be addressed.

Since the 1990s, the term “transitional justice” has been commonly used to label approaches that deal with the past. From a world polity perspective transitional justic is based on global norms and offers various methods for coming to terms with macro-criminal wrongdoings. The most recent development in transitional justice was the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). In the article we illustrate the fruitfulness of world polity research by referring to the case of Cambodia, with a special focus on the implementation of victim participation by the ECCC. Our argument is that even if there are particular local conditions for the Cambodian way of dealing with crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, transitional justice in Cambodia can be seen as an adoption of globally institutionalised expectations of how a state should present itself with respect to its dealing with past human rights violations. We argue that the inclusion of victims in Cambodian transitional justice mechanisms could be seen as a consequence of shifts in the global environment. For that, the shift of seeing genocide and mass murder not only as evil or a fate, but as a violation of individual human rights, is crucial. Even so, we acknowledge the enabling effect that local circumstances had on these developments.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was established in 2004 through an agreement between the United Nations (UN) and the Cambodian government, as a means to address the crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The ECCC is one in a row of international judicial institutions set up in response to gross violations of human rights, known as 'hybrid' courts, encompassing both national and international elements in their structure, composition and jurisdiction. Hybrid courts, allowing for a higher degree of participation by national actors, are expected to be better placed to give long-lasting effects in the societies in which mass atrocities have taken place. This article examines that claim with regard to the ECCC, and explores the value added by participation by various national actors in the judicial proceedings. After giving an overview of international standards of judicial independence, it provides an analysis of concerns that may be raised with regard to the judicial independence of the ECCC. This article argues that some aspects of national ownership may be promoted at the cost of lowering international standards of justice, and may cause an overall lack of ownership or accountability of the proceedings.

Transitional justice ideas, processes, and institutions offer post-conflict and tormented societies the glimmer of hope of a more stable future erected upon values of the rule of law, accountability, justice, post-conflict reconstruction, and development. Societies wracked by violence see transitional justice as offering the tools to midwife a democratic, rule-of-law state. Broadly speaking, transitional justice can be said to be concerned with how societies address legacies of past human rights abuses, mass atrocity, or other forms of severe social trauma, including genocide or civil war, in order to build a more democratic, just, and peaceful future. Epistemically, the field of transitional justice is variegated, comprising theoretical debates, the comparative assessment of domestic accountability schemes, international criminal justice, the study of truth commissions, and ethical-legal debates concerning the morality of compromise on accountability for gross and systemic violations of human rights. Several subthemes to the discipline suggest the absence of complete coherence in its characterization and praxis. The focus of this article on transitional justice in Africa domesticates the exploration of the subject matter in the African experience. Transitional justice in the African context takes on a special character and orientation. While the core objective of transitional justice praxis in Africa remains similar to transitional justice orthodoxy in the international context—namely, the fight against impunity and the push for accountability and post-conflict reconstruction and development—the emerging consensus points to the effective realization of socioeconomic justice, gender justice, and the right to development as equally critical, if not central, to the redress of past injustices. Instrumental to the successful delivery of this broadened set of objectives is a combination of traditional and nontraditional frameworks embedded in a wide range of laws, policies, institutions, and community norms and customs. In combination, they present the rough contours of an African model and mechanism for not only dealing with the legacies of conflicts and violations of human rights, but also addressing governance deficits and developmental challenges in line with the African Union’s Agenda 2063. This article is structured around a number of themes aimed at deepening appreciation of the field of transitional justice in Africa, namely: Transitional Justice Laws, Policies, and Norms; Transitional Justice Accountability Systems; criminal accountability in Africa’s transitional justice praxis; Human Rights, Democracy, and Governance; Decolonization and Postcoloniality; Conflict and Transitional Justice; Transitional Justice Goals and Outcomes; Reimagining the Field of Transitional Justice; and journals publishing on transitional justice.

Both the former S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where some 15,000 Cambodians were detained and tortured, and corresponding Choeung Ek ‘Killing Fields’, have become widely recognizable international symbols of the crimes of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the communist regime that controlled the small Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1979. While thousands of international visitors have travelled to these sites every year since they were preserved and curated by the Vietnamese-backed regime in the early 1980s to globally condemn the Khmer Rouge, until recently, many Cambodians had never visited S-21 (now the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes) or Choeung Ek. ‘Study tours’ that were first undertaken by civil society organizations in 2004 to bring groups of Cambodians to the two memorial sites and the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal courthouse,1 creating a narrative of violation and redemption, have now been largely co-opted and expanded by the Public Affairs section of the court itself. As the tribunal’s second case unfolds, hundreds of Cambodians from around the country are bussed to the sites during proceedings in an effort to ‘educate’ them about their country’s past and the cases underway at the court. During a tour held in early September 2012, men, women and childrenfrom rural Takeo Province, located in the southern part of the country and bordering Vietnam, met at the local commune office at 4 a.m. to catch buses for the trip. Many said they had seen programmes about the tribunal and tours on TV that had motivated them to accept their village chief’s offer to participate in the programme. ‘I lost many relatives during the Pol Pot time. I want to know who was on top, who was responsible’, one woman told me. ‘I have watched on TV about the court, but I don’t think it is as clear as being here to see for myself’ (my emphasis). Itineraries of tours vary depending on time limitations and coordination with other groups. For example, one group may visit Tuol Sleng and/or Choeung Ek in the morning, while others start their day at the tribunal itself. Before relatively rushed and unmediated afternoon tours of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, the Takeo group began the day at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)building with a briefing from a press officer about the history of the tribunal and the proceedings that had taken place to date. In a somewhat politically truncated narration of the court’s creation – which will be explained in greater depth later on in this chapter – the press officer said that the ECCC had come into being through the efforts of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who had requested the United Nations create a court to ‘discover who was really responsible for crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge’. Several older members of the audience interjected to express their support for this effort, saying that they had also ‘worked hard in the fields’ and never had enough to eat during the DK period. Another man in attendance, however, more nervously inquired as to who, exactly, was being investigated. ‘I was the head of a collective during that time’, he said, ‘and I never knew of any killings or any orders to execute people’. To reassure him, the press officer explained the mission of the court is to try ‘senior leaders and those most responsible’ for the atrocities committed during the DK period. ‘The court is not interested in small people’, he said, ‘only the people who made policy. You do not need to worry’. The exchanges that took place at this press briefing illustrate some of thetensions inherent in the current judicial and educational efforts underway in Cambodia. For reasons both political and social, the ECCC and its corresponding study tours aim to create a historical narrative of the DK period that emphasizes the culpability of a few top leaders and fail to addresscrimes committed throughout the DK power structure. While responsibility for crimes was actually much more widespread, the narrative promoted by the government grants de facto amnesty to lower-level perpetrators, shielding former Khmer Rouge in the current regime (including Hun Sen) from greater scrutiny and, officials argue, facilitating social reconciliation. As part of this effort, memorial sites that were originally created primarily to justify Vietnamese occupation of the country to an international audience have now been repurposed to serve as explanatory devices for the work of the ECCC to Cambodians. Yet ECCC-coordinated tours often provide little in the way of interpretation or historical context, relying on the physicality of evidence at Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek and even the court itself to convey this state-sanctioned version of history. In many ways, the lack of clarity serves the government’s purpose – too much explanation and discussion could lead to questions that subvert the authority of the official narrative being formed. Yet codification of a generally agreed-upon history of DK is still very much evolving, and Cambodians bring their own experiences, ideas and biases to these study-tour encounters, affecting the extent to which the government’s message is accepted, rejected or incorporated to varying extents into pre-existing narratives. Numerous scholars have written about the politically charged process ofmemory formation in Cambodia after the fall of DK, wherein the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) regime sought to legitimize itself both domestically and abroad by highlighting Khmer Rouge atrocities. While sociologist Serge Thion argues that the PRK’s efforts ‘obliterated’ (Thion 1993: 183) the ability of Cambodians living under the regime to form their own narratives of the period and Michael Vickery (1984) contends that the version of history promoted by the government did not correspond to the majority of Cambodians’ experiences under DK, Judy Ledgerwood writes that the PRK narrative served as the starting point for Cambodians to construct an understanding of DK (Ledgerwood 1997: 93). Of course, this would have only been true for those Cambodians living in PRK-controlled areas of the country throughout the 1980s, not those who continued to fight with a repackaged Khmer Rouge coalition force from near the Thai border. While Cambodians were urged by the state to move beyond the past in the 1990s in the interest of reconciliation, the establishment of the ECCC in 2003 has launched a new era of outreach, education and memorial efforts. Many of these have involved work by civil society organizations2 informed by international discourses related to human rights, democracy and transitional justice. This chapter focuses on one such effort – the tribunal study tours – whichbegan largely as a civil society initiative, but which has now been co-opted to a great extent by the ECCC itself. By exploring the reactions of Cambodians who participate in such tours, the chapter makes two major claims: (1) that although there is always variation in individual experience, the ways in which Cambodians respond to the government-backed narrative put forth at theECCC and memorial sites appear to be highly dependent on whether participants lived in a PRK-controlled area or a Khmer Rouge stronghold after the fall of DK in 1979, and; (2) that, while many Cambodians say they joined the tours in order to learn more about the DK period, they often leave with numerous unanswered questions due to the lack of clarity and explanation. Concerning the latter claim, Cambodians are frequently able to derive satisfaction from the experiential and performative aspects of their visits as acts of bearing witness to atrocity. Their reactions are similar to those that Rachel Hughes found among foreign tourists to Tuol Sleng (Hughes 2008: 326). My findings are drawn from ethnographic work conducted in Cambodiafrom late August to early November of 2012, a period in which I interviewed 52 people (some multiple times) and also engaged in participant observation with select individuals who worked at the two memorial sites I was researching. My informants consisted predominantly of Cambodians who participated in study tours, hailing from both former PRK-controlled areas as well as Khmer Rouge strongholds. They were drawn primarily from two major areas – the previously mentioned Takeo Province and Pailin Province, a notorious former Khmer Rouge stronghold in the northwest of Cambodia near the Thai border. Several of the current defendants at the ECCC had been living freely in Pailin before they were arrested in 2007. My informants also included staff at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek as well as Cambodians from other organizations who worked with the memorial sites in some capacity. This study builds upon the two-and-a-half years I had previously lived in the country, a period I spent working as a journalist and frequently interviewing Cambodians about the disastrous period of ‘three years, eight months and 20 days’.3

Sexual and gender-based crimes have only recently begun to be treated as serious crimes in international law, and there are still many obstacles to their successful prosecution. This is especially true in the case of Cambodia, where trials against leading members of the Khmer Rouge are taking place before the special hybrid court set up for this purpose, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The difficulties facing those who attempt to hold the perpetrators of sexual and gender-based crimes under the Khmer Rouge regime accountable for their acts are formidable. First, in view of the sheer scope and magnitude of the Khmer Rouge's violations of human rights, sexual and gender-based crimes are viewed by many in Cambodia as being of secondary importance; moreover, there is a widespread perception that the regime was highly moralistic and did not tolerate such crimes. Secondly, the jurisdiction of the ECCC has been interpreted in a restrictive way, posing problems for the prosecution of sexual and gender-based crimes. Thirdly, the most widespread form of such crimes under the Khmer Rouge was the practice of forced marriage, which has not yet been codified as a crime under international law, which raises additional problems for the prosecution.KeywordsSexual ViolenceSexual MinorityRome StatuteTrial ChamberTransitional JusticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Among international and hybrid criminal tribunals, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) is one of the few that include a reparation system for victims of crimes under its jurisdiction. This article analyses how and to what extent the ECCC has used international human rights law (IHRL) to interpret and apply reparation provisions of the ECCC legal instruments. The ECCC has largely relied on IHRL sources, particularly, the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law, case-law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. However, such use has been adapted to the legal framework of the ECCC. Unlike human rights courts, the ECCC determines individual criminal liability and, thus, can only order reparations against convicted individuals.

The doctrine of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) is a form of individual criminal liability in international criminal law. This doctrine was formed by the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY in the Tadic Case in 1999. Since then, the JCE has grown to play a major role in the charges and convictions before international criminal tribunal. Due to this doctrine, the members who formed the criminal plan are responsible not only for those crimes they agreed to, but for all other crimes that would be considered the natural and foreseeable consequence of the plan regardless of whether those crimes were committed by person outside the criminal plan. The JCE is accepted as one of the most important and effective tools in the prosecution, however, it also is one of the most difficult and controversial prosecutorial tools. The employment of JCE in the prosecution before the international criminal tribunals frequently faces the problem of the violation of the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. Similarly, before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the application of JCE has become a problematic issue on the question regarding the legality; whether the application of JCE before the ECCC, for taking into account the crimes committed during 1975-1979, violates the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. The JCE is considered as a mode of liability within the meaning of ‘committing’ in Article 29 of the ECCC Law, then the application of JCE before the ECCC is in the legal regime of the Court. However, the use of JCE must respect the principle of nullum crimen sine lege, which is the fundamental principle in international human rights law and international criminal law. Due to this, the application of this doctrine must satisfy the condition of legality, that is, the existence of the law requirement and foreseeability and accessibility requirement. The main objective of this study is to analyse the legality and legitimacy of the application of JCE as at the ECCC, particularly in the case of Kiang Guek Eav alias Duch (Duch). The study shows that the application of the extended form of JCE (JCE III) before the ECCC would violate the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. However, to analyse the legitimacy, the ECCC must balance the values of the proceedings: legal, political and moral, which is based on a case-by-case basis. The study on the Duch Case shows that even the application of JCE III would be illegal; however, the application of JCE before the ECCC against Duch is still legitimate. Hence, in the author’s view, the doctrine of JCE may be a legitimate tool in the prosecution of Duch at the ECCC.

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.

Through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the Interim Constitution of 2007, Nepal has vowed to address the conflict-era human rights violations including through adopting a credible transitional justice processes. However, the national commitments towards ensuring accountability for past human rights violations and ensuring non-repetition of such violations in future are yet to be fulfilled. In this context, the judicial activism appears to have been a silver lining in terms of taking forward the transitional justice issues. In this backdrop, this chapter aims to analyse the decisions of Supreme Court of Nepal pertaining to promoting accountability for the past human rights violations and to examine the strengths and weaknesses of judicial response in the light of victims’ right to effective remedy guaranteed under the international human rights treaties and jurisprudence. This chapter finally provides a set of suggestions towards strengthening the transitional justice process in Nepal.

This article builds on theories about the expressive function of law and uses Structural Topic Modelling to examine how the prioritisation of civil and political rights (CPR) issues by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has affected the agendas of Cambodian human rights NGOs with an international profile. It asks whether these NGOs’ focus on CPR issues can be traced back to the near-exclusive focus on CPR issues by the court, and whether this has implications for the creation of a “thick” kind of human rights accountability. It argues that, considering the nature of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal policy, it would have been within the mandate and capacity of the court to pay more attention to actions that also constituted violations of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR). The fact that the court did not do this and instead almost completely obscured ESCR rhetorically has triggered a similar blind spot for ESCR issues on the part of human rights NGOs, which could have otherwise played an important role in creating a culture of accountability around this category of human rights. Does this mean that violators of ESCR are more likely to escape prosecution going forward?

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.

Abstract: This article extends recent academic debates about the sociohistorical entanglements between neoliberalism and human rights by exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone, which followed the country's decade-long civil war (1991-2002). It analyses the ways both the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) drew on 'economic' discourses, variously using the concepts of 'greed', 'corruption' and 'governance' to explain the broader context of the human rights violations with which they were concerned. By critically tracing how these discourses were mobilised, this article shows that neither the SLTRC nor the SCSL challenged the neoliberal vision of human rights. Rather, each process produced a narrative about Sierra Leone's civil war that not only effaced the deleterious role of neoliberal policies in the history of the conflict but also reproduced neoliberal ideas both about conflict and the economy. In this respect, my exploration of the Sierra Leone case demonstrates the importance of paying closer attention to how 'the socioeconomic' is conceptualised and accounted for within transitional justice and broader human rights processes, especially if they are to pose a more adequate challenge to the neoliberal order. Shorter abstract: This article extends recent academic debates about the sociohistorical entanglements between neoliberalism and human rights by exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone after the country's decade-long civil war. The article focuses on the ways both the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission drew on discourses of 'greed', 'corruption' and 'governance' to explain the broader socioeconomic context of the human rights violations they were concerned with. The article demonstrates these discourses did not challenge but instead reinforced neoliberal visions of human rights.

Many positive outcomes for both individuals and society are assumed to emerge from the use of transitional justice mechanisms. In this chapter I examine the most important of these goals and posited outcomes: ending impunity, developing the rule of law, promoting democracy, and various aspects of justice and reconciliation. I examine the extent to which each goal is being fulfilled by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and discuss the limitations that occur locally and globally. What becomes apparent from this discussion is that the goals of liberal transitional justice bear little resemblance to the goals or outcomes of the ECCC and that therefore analyses of the ECCC on the basis of the usual transitional justice precepts are unhelpful.