Transitional Justice

The article examines the EU’s policy framework, programs and tools on support to transitional justice, and evaluates their impact and challenges. Transitional justice refers to the various ways of addressing the past human rights violations and serious crimes that occurred in contexts of political transition, such as post-conflict or post-authoritarian situations. The EU has adopted a comprehensive policy framework on support to transitional justice in 2015, which defines its principles, objectives, and modalities of engagement with partner countries and international and regional organisations on transitional justice issues. The EU has also used various instruments and actions to support transitional justice initiatives worldwide, such as providing financial assistance, engaging in political dialogue, offering technical expertise, and advocating for transitional justice norms and standards. The article also illustrates how the EU has supported transitional justice processes in different contexts and regions, such as dealing with the legacy of World War II, the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the Arab Spring. The article concludes by identifying some of the achievements and shortcomings of the EU’s involvement in transitional justice processes, such as contributing to accountability, recognition, trust, reconciliation, and non-recurrence; but also facing inconsistency, selectivity, conditionality, interference, cooptation, politicisation, fragmentation, duplication, etc. The article also suggests some ways to improve the EU’s policy framework, programs and tools on support to transitional justice, such as enhancing consistency, coherence, coordination, complementarity, and adaptability. The article also explores how the EU’s role and approaches in the field of transitional justice can affect its own identity and credibility as a global actor that promotes human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as core values of its external action.

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.

Reviewed by: Knowledge for Peace: Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice ed. by Briony Jones and Ulrike Lühe Claire Wright (bio) Knowledge for Peace: Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice (Edward Elgar Press, Briony Jones & Ulrike Lühe eds., 2021). ISBN 978 1 78990 534 2 (ebook, Open Access), 288 pages. As a social scientist working within a broadly qualitative paradigm, I acknowledge that the politics of knowledge and my own positionality have shaped my work and experience. I have carried out in-country and on-line fieldwork in Latin America for the past fifteen years and, during this time, I have been faced with very real dilemmas of my relationship with the “field,” (or, in more human terms, the individuals and societies that I am studying). Such dilemmas include issues of negotiating consent, ownership of voice, and—crucially—the possible impacts of my research, not just on other scholars, but on real-life political processes and relationships. On top of this, I struggle with how to meaningfully overcome my own situation of privilege as a white, female scholar from the Global North and the exigencies of English-speaking academia, which are often incompatible with the dynamics and interests of the Global South. Indeed, knowledge production frequently reproduces colonial relationships and even the most well-intentioned ethics committees and concerns over “due diligence” may actually reproduce power dynamics between the North and the South. In this context, the edited volume Knowledge for Peace. Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice1 offers an engaging and timely read for all scholars, who, like me, continue to grapple with these issues. Focusing on the field of Transitional Justice (TJ), and with broad reference to cases from the African continent, Briony Jones (University of Warwick, UK) and Ulrike Lühe (Swisspeace/University of Basel) bring together a truly diverse group of authors (from scholars to practitioners) to discuss the impact of how knowledge is produced—particularly power dynamics and insider/outsider status—on peace-building processes. The interface between theory and practice is the backbone of the book, which opens up a discussion on the high-stakes contexts of mass human rights violations. In recent years, there has been an emerging academic discussion on the (neo)colonial nature of TJ2 and a couple of noteworthy reflections on how scholars from the Global North might usefully carry out fieldwork in such contexts.3 However, few go as far in content or are as original in perspective [End Page 210] as Knowledge for Peace, for reasons I shall outline below. The volume opens with a very helpful introduction in which the two editors (Jones and Lühe) explain the rationale behind the book, namely that “[t]he field of transitional justice is characterized by substantial and difficult debates over what ‘better’ looks like, and we offer our contribution to these debates with this book on the politics of knowledge.”4 Having situated the volume in several debates within TJ scholarship and practice—including “knowledge imperialism”—they turn to discuss the two key themes that run through the chapters, namely: the interlinkages between the processes and politics of knowledge production; and the research-policy-practice nexus. The opening chapter also summarises the contributions of the different authors and explains the way in which the volume is organised: a first part, which offers a series of discussions on the politics of knowledge from a theoretical perspective; a second part, which explores the linkages between knowledge production and agenda-setting; and a third part which focuses on the profiles and expertise of knowledge producers. Rather than summarising the contents of the different chapters that together make up the three sections of the edited volume, here I would like to point to four particularly original and thought-provoking chapters and tease out their contributions for our understanding of the politics of knowledge and its implications for the field of Transitional Justice. The first is Chapter 4 “Producing knowledge on and for transitional justice: reflections on a collaborative research project,” co-authored by Briony Jones, Ulrike Lühe, Gilbert Fokou, Kuyang Harriet Logo, Leben...

Objectives: The importance of the study stems from the fact that the region with all its countries, including Iraq, was and still lacks political stability, whether due to internal factors or external influences, or the conciliation of workers, and since transitional justice is an important idea, and essential in managing the stages of change, a solid democratic state that concerns everyone and cares, Everyone participates, from here, and through the centrality of the issue of change and the importance of the issue of transitional justice in it, and through the fact that the transitional experience in Iraq is a practical experience that took place early in the region, and in a pluralistic society that reflects the previous regime in which there are many features, and common to most of the prevailing political systems in the region This makes the study of his experience in this topic and the problems he encountered a suitable case for a useful study with an impact on more than one level. The research paper aims to study the negative aspects of Iraq's experience in the field of transitional justice, and its transformation from a transitional justice case into a tool of factional and partisan revenge, whose procedures are marred by a lot of arbitrariness, which makes the topic useful for those who work to implement these programs in the future in order to avoid problems and mistakes . Methods : The study adopts an analytical, inductive approach that relies on uncovering facts by starting from the details, then proceeds gradually to laws, general rules, and the college, where the Iraqi experience, its details, and the internal and external influences that accompanied it will be examined, down to the features and features And the facts of this experience, especially the negative aspects of it that affected the state of stability and construction in it, and this is particularly evident by analyzing the trends, paths, and problematic of transitional justice interventions in the current political transformations in Iraq after 2003, because understanding the course of the struggle for power and the influence between the components It will help us understand the dimensions of the competition for power and influence between these political blocs that represented the Iraqi opposition during the days of the political system under the rule of the (Baath Party) before its fall in 2003. By perpetuating the phenomenon of competition and conflict between political blocs, including the perpetuation of two phenomena: The first is uncertainty about the possibility of renewed violence in the future. The second is the intense competition over how to institutionalize the balance of power in Iraq after 2003. Results: The failure of transitional justice in Iraq, and the failure to implement its real mechanisms that do not contradict human rights principles, was the reason for Iraq to reach its current stage, and the increase in impunity and injustice of persons who were not the cause of committing any human rights violations. The results indicate that the last feature is indeed important because the deep partisan motives linked mainly to sectarianism, ethnicity, nationalism, and to a lesser extent regionalism, are the main determinants of the competition between the Iraqi political blocs that took over the rule of Iraq after 2003. The reasonable explanation is that a sense of the narrow political and partisan gains of these Iraqi political blocs may compensate for the debts owed due to past violations and urge a preference for avoiding the pursuit of truth or punishment for fear that political gains may be threatened in some way. Conclusions : Failure to resort to fair legal accountability causes new human rights violations, so the following question can be raised: Does ignoring legal accountability increase the number of perpetrators of violations, and help some of the perpetrators in the previous regime to get away from punishment, and wrong others? And that the negative engagement in transitional justice file, ignoring legal mechanisms, and to obey the wishes of the party, and lead to factional influence in the political process and thus stumble in the democratic transition? Keywords : Democratic political Iraqi punishment transitional justice damage construction DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-6-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2021

This article examines the various points at which accountability for economic crimes, including large-scale corruption, intersects with accountability for human rights violations. To date, transitional justice has largely compartmentalized legacies of abuse into those based on a narrow set of human rights violations and those based on economic crimes, which the author argues is an inadequate way to address both sets of abuses. Because corruption and human rights violations are mutually reinforcing forms of abuse, the field of transitional justice should approach economic crimes in the same way it approaches civil and political rights violations. The author suggests that traditional transitional justice mechanisms would be strengthened by an engagement with corruption and economic crimes, which would allow for both sources of impunity to be confronted.

A recent United Nations report on North Korea reports of widespread human rights violations inside North Korea.1 The right to life, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and assembly are regularly violated by the government and its agents.2 Over the years, many people have been subjected to detention, torture, and forced labor in government-operated detention camps in North Korea. Oppressive rule is always associated with gross violations of human rights. One of the challenges that a unified democratic Korea would have to face is how to deal with human rights violations perpetrated in the past. In transitional justice literature relating to societies transitioning from oppressive and authoritarian rule or conflict to democratic governance, one of the major points of discussion is always what to do with perpetrators of past human rights violations when conflicts or oppressive regimes have ended. The United Nations has a long history of assisting societies devastated by conflict or emerging from repressive rule to reestablish the rule of law and develop mechanisms to deal with large-scale human rights violations. For the United Nations, transitional justice is the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale human rights abuses, in order to ensure accountability for the abuses, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation and the transformation of society to establish a democratic society that is underpinned by human rights values.3

To date, only sparse attention has been afforded to the potential and realized intersections between transitional justice and cultural rights. Despite a range of advancements and interventions, cultural rights have long been a blind spot in the field of transitional justice, one that has yet to be thoroughly interrogated on either a theoretical or practical level. This is at odds with a demonstrated willingness to challenge transitional justice’s preoccupation with bodily integrity crimes, and civil and political rights violations more generally. This chapter attempts to interrogate this blind spot by analysing the engagement of cultural rights in both the discourse and practice and transitional justice. In the field’s constantly growing and evolving discourse, cultural rights are routinely omitted, backgrounded, or discussed without reference to State obligations under international human rights law. Cultural rights are likewise marginalized in transitional justice practice. This is especially the case with cultural rights violations, or cultural wrongs more generally, which are not confronted and redressed in the same manner as other human rights violations. At the same time, cultural rights are not wholly absent from transitional justice and, indeed, are increasingly being addressed, respected, accommodated, and studied in interesting and significant ways. Several relatively recent developments have helped to push cultural rights increasingly towards the centre of transitional justice thinking and practice. However, these constitute clear exceptions to transitional justice’s overall antipathy towards culture and stand in stark contrast to the field’s historical marginalization of cultural rights.

Corporate accountability for complicity in past and ongoing gross violations of human rights and economic crimes is a rapidly growing area of interest in the transitional justice field. Addressing such violations and their role in fueling conflict and repression is now recognized as a key component of societies’ efforts to come to terms with the past, and, perhaps even more importantly, creating the conditions for non-recurrence of violent conflict and human rights abuses. Truth commissions have increasingly included such economic violations in their mandates, and corporate actors have been the focus of a number of high-profile court cases. Such civil claims and criminal cases appear to offer limited redress thus far, but the normative landscape of transitional justice is shifting, both at national and international levels. Scholarly interest has spiked, as illustrated in the review essay in this volume by Evelyne Owiye Asaala, which highlights three new volumes that unpack recent developments. We also see increased civil society mobilization to demand that corporate actors are held to account and contribute to reparations. In some cases, the amounts that corporate actors can or will contribute to compensate survivors dwarf the financial contribution to reparations funds by governments, demonstrating not just their potential contribution to transitional justice, but the scope of their liability for past abuses.1

Transitional justice discourse is generally accepted as having its foundations located in the theoretical, policy and practical implications of dealing with past human rights violations in societies that have experienced either repressive politics or violent conflict. Many theorists and policy-makers resolutely assume or defend the notion that ‘dealing with the past’ is where the debates about, and contribution of, the transitional justice paradigm uniquely lie.2Understood in this way, transitional justice as a field of study has grown exponentially, comprising theoretical debates, the comparative assessment of domestic accountability schemes, international criminal justice, the study of truth commissions, and ethical-legal debate concerning the morality of compromise on accountability for gross and systematic violations of human rights.This foreword, building on the previous work of its authors,3extends and expands our contention that transitional justice in this narrow sense must be located in a broader and more problematised understanding of justice in contemporary transitions. We also use the opportunity provided by this symposium to highlight an expansion of conceptual horizons being carried out at the Transitional Justice Institute (University of Ulster), and the innovative approach to the transitional justice field being advanced by a group of diverse inter-disciplinary scholars. The approach advocates both drawing on other disciplines, and firmly supporting parallel disciplinary fields to work alongside a legal research agenda; affirming the importance of rigorous cross-jurisdictional comparisons; and utilising empirical and socio-legal methodology to advance legal inquiry.

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.

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the rule of law, delivering justice and aiding reconciliation – implicitly encompass a resilience element, transitional justice has not been explicitly theorised as a process for building resilience in communities and societies that have suffered large-scale violence and human rights violations. The chapters in this unique volume theoretically and empirically explore the concept of resilience in diverse societies that have experienced mass violence and human rights abuses. They analyse the extent to which transitional justice processes have – and can – contribute to resilience and how, in so doing, they can foster adaptive peacebuilding. This book is available as Open Access.

This article analyses the Indonesian efforts to resolve past human rights abuses under the mechanism of transitional justice following the downfall of President Soeharto on May 21, 1998. The focus of analysis is the implementation of transitional justice in the cases of Aceh, Papua, and East Timor during the transitional period. This article shows that the efforts to enforce transitional justice in these cases have been faced with obstacles. Although there have been notable efforts in terms of both judicial and non-judicial to enforce transitional justice, the final results are not satisfactory. Transitional justice mechanism to resolve past human rights abuses was implemented only with half-baked and supported with half-hearted. As a result, it has failed to bring justice for the victims. There are lessons can and should be learned from these transitional justice cases for resolving other past human rights abuse cases in Indonesia today. The current Indonesian government should pay attention to the lessons in order to resolve past human rights violations in accordance with its promise during presidential election campaign in 2014. Otherwise, it is likely to repeat the same mistake and failure of justice dealing with past human rights violations.

East Asia is a region that has been the focus of discussions about economic development, democratization, nuclear proliferation, technological innovations, and health-related issues. Due to its historical past of colonization (including countries that have been colonizers and those that have been colonized), interstate and regional wars, involvement in world wars, and authoritarian governance, it is also a region that has experienced human rights violations, human rights advancements, and human rights–related policy developments. Thus, the study of East Asia and human rights encompasses colonial, Cold War, post–Cold War, and the post September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks periods of history. Based on the vast amount of scholarship on human rights in the region, a spectrum of approaches should be used to study human rights that (a) examines case-specific human rights violations which focus on vulnerable populations in society; (b) theorizes and questions the essence of human rights and its value systems; and (c) explores developments in human rights–related policy that involve transitional justice processes of truth-seeking, reparations, and criminal accountability regarding past human rights crimes. Examination of historic violations of women’s rights and children’s rights in the case of comfort women who were sexually enslaved by Japan’s Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War centers the victims and their experiences. A focus on minority rights leads to the consideration of issues of human trafficking of women and girls in Mongolia and North Korea, social and ethnic minority groups’ concerns in Japan and South Korea, and the plight of Uyghur people in China. The Asian (Confucian) values debate leads to consideration of why human rights have been questioned, why they may be considered as impositions, and which approaches can be taken to re-examine human rights with regard to this region. Finally, the discussion of transitional justice as it relates to East Asian states provides a much needed recognition of the importance of the region for innovating transitional justice policies.

During the past three decades, national human rights institutions (NHRIs) have become an increasingly common feature of transitional justice frameworks. Promoted by international organisations, including the United Nations and its relevant agencies, and by several regional NHRI networks, contemporary human rights policy and discourse has coalesced around the idea that NHRIs may contribute to transitional justice by ensuring accountability and combatting impunity. In practice, however, relatively little is known about the specific roles envisaged for and played by NHRIs in transitional and post-conflict contexts. This article examines the role of NHRIs in transitional justice from the 1970s to the present. Drawing on the mandates and experiences of 137 NHRIs, it demonstrates that NHRIs are increasingly being afforded responsibility for three types of accountability tasks associated with transitional justice: investigating past human rights violations, holding post-transitional actors and institutions to account; and managing the provision of reparations to victims of human rights abuses. This, it argues, represents a small but significant development, both for the practice of transitional justice and for the roles and functions of NHRIs.

This paper examines the similarities and differences of the legal discourses on the prohibition of retroactive laws within the European human rights framework, and more broadly, a temporal framework that accompanies questions of historical injustice. The paper considers the significance of the notion of retrospective justice in post-1989 Europe, and more specifically in Germany and Poland. From a criminal law perspective the idea of punishing people for an act that was not a crime at the time of commission is regarded as reprehensible. However, a different temporal narrative was evoked with the fall of Communism in 1989 that was based on responses to atrocities committed during the Second World War. The paper outlines the legal context that frames retrospective justice, nationally and regionally, and considers the importance of permitting the law to work retroactively. By examining certain aspects of the German and Polish experiences, the paper concurs that retrospective justice in post-Communist Europe contributes a specific set of problems to the field of transitional justice, none of which sit comfortably with one solution, and all of which demonstrate that narratives on select chapters of Communist histories remain unfinished. The narratives also show that transitional criminal justice has taken on a permanent character in legal discourses, in which retrospective justice takes on a dynamic meaning. Key words: Retrospective justice; Retroactive laws; Transitional justice; East Germany; Poland; Border guards; Martial law; Judicial immunity; European Court of Human Rights; Gustav Radbruch; Polish constitutional tribunal