Justice Measures Research Articles

Transitions without Justice: Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal

ABSTRACT∞ Typically, human rights abusers are widely condemned by the international community in the context of transitional justice. But what happens when the transition to democracy generates refugees that are not permitted to return to what appears to now be a stable, peaceful democracy? This is the case of Bhutan, who forcefully expelled its largest minority community during a period of nation building, then successfully transitioned to democracy without any accountability for the crimes that occurred during that process. While approximately 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in camps awaited some measure of justice and hoped for repatriation, the international community provided them with a democratically grounded education to raise awareness of their rights. But this education was not matched by any pathways to exercise those rights or achieve justice. This article examines how particular challenges to transitional justice are experienced by refugee and diaspora communities, and how current justice structures frequently fail to meet their needs.

"Transitional justice": general characteristics

The subject of the study is a special procedural mechanism for establishing the circumstances of the commission of genocide and other crimes against humanity during the functioning of various totalitarian regimes that widely use the practice of mass violations of human rights, the ideology of historical exclusivity, and the destruction of civil society institutions. Usually we are talking about states that have survived dictatorship or war, so the center of judicial knowledge is, first of all, precedents of gross violations of the rules of warfare, torture, mass executions, slavery. The declared goals of "transitional justice" are the rehabilitation of victims of repression. The authors conducted a study of the activities of special judicial presences and truth and reconciliation commissions, summarized the mediation experience implemented in the states of Africa and Southeast Asia. The research methodology is based on the principles of dialectical cognition, as well as a wide range of general scientific and private scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, legal comparative studies). The main conclusions of the study are concentrated around the specifics of the subject jurisdiction of conciliation commissions and tribunals, covering only acts of violence against the civilian population. For the first time, the authors have assessed the effectiveness of these institutions in a number of states. The various methodologies that make up "transitional justice" usually combine the "healing" measures of restorative justice (truth and reconciliation commissions) and a parallel system of punitive justice (mainly against those primarily responsible for the most serious crimes and their direct perpetrators). The text of the article substantiates that the activities carried out within the framework of "transitional justice" are aimed at reforming social institutions by restoring the rule of law and ensuring the functioning of constitutionally established judicial bodies in the future.

Need for an Evolved Groundwater Justice in Rural Areas of Uttar Pradesh, India

As groundwater is the primary element of life, countries all over the world are experimenting with legal reforms. The degree to which law reforms combine justice and sustainability is a crucial question. In response to this question, the present article focuses on a case study of Uttar Pradesh, India. Our response is based on a content analysis of the Uttar Pradesh Groundwater (Management and Regulation) Act, 2019, and the Uttar Pradesh Groundwater (Management and Regulation) Rules, 2020. Three conclusions emerged from our investigation. First, the 2019 Groundwater Act and the 2020 Draft Groundwater Rules are primarily motivated by concerns about resource sustainability, particularly in areas where the water table is steadily declining. Still, neither the 2019 Groundwater Act nor the 2020 Draft Groundwater Rules propose any proactive groundwater justice measures. Second, we suggest that some locally defined basic elements are critical in supporting sustainability and – to a lesser extent – groundwater justice. These characteristics include a community’s ability to (1) recognize a crisis and show a willingness to address it; (2) establish a rule-bound community groundwater resource; (3) demonstrate leadership and a sense of community; and (4) make use of awareness, information, and knowledge. Our third conclusion is that there is a need for community practices and state-led groundwater law to co-evolve; this co-evolution has the potential to create groundwater arrangements that support both groundwater justice and sustainability.

Perceptions of Justice in Clinical Learning Environments: Development and Validation of an Organizational Justice Measure for Medical Trainees.

This study aimed to develop an instrument to measure medical trainees' perceptions of justice in clinical learning environments. Between 2019 and 2023, the authors conducted a multiyear, multi-institutional, multiphase study to develop a 16-item justice measure with 4 dimensions: interpersonal, informational, procedural, and distributive. The authors gathered validity evidence based on test content, internal structure, and relationships with other variables across 3 phases. Phase 1 involved drafting items and gathering evidence that items measured intended dimensions. Phase 2 involved analyzing relevance of items for target groups, examining interitem correlations and factor loadings in a preliminary analysis, and obtaining reliability estimates. Phase 3 involved a confirmatory factor analysis and collecting convergent and discriminant validity evidence. In phase 1, 63 of 91 draft items were retained following a content validation exercise gauging how well items measured targeted dimensions (mean [SD] item ratings within dimensions, 4.16 [0.36] to 4.39 [0.34]) on a 5-point Likert scale (with 1 indicating not at all well and 5 indicating extremely well). In phase 2, 30 items were removed due to low factor loadings (i.e., < 0.40), and 4 items per dimension were selected (factor loadings, 0.42-0.89). In phase 3, a confirmatory factor analysis supported the 4-dimension model (χ2 = 610.14, P < .001; comparative fit index = 0.90, Tucker-Lewis Index = 0.87, root mean squared error of approximation = 0.11, standardized root mean squared residual = 0.06), with convergent and discriminant validity evidence showing hypothesized positive correlations with a justice measure (r = 0.93, P < .001), trait positive affect (r = 0.46, P < .001), and emotional stability (r = 0.33, P < .001) and negative correlations with trait negative affect (r = -0.39, P < .001). Results indicate the measure's potential utility in understanding justice perceptions and designing targeted interventions.

Historical Violence and Public Attitudes towards Justice: Evidence from the United States

ABSTRACT This article brings transitional justice scholarship to bear on the case of racial violence in the United States. We investigate how knowledge of racial terror lynchings shapes Black Americans’ support for symbolic and material transitional justice measures. We administer a survey with an embedded experiment to Black residents in Maryland, a US transitional justice pioneer. We provide select respondents with information about historical lynching violence and find that they are more likely to support symbolic transitional justice (e.g., apologies and memorial markers) than individuals presented with information on contemporary police killings. Regarding material transitional justice (e.g., monetary reparations and community projects), we find no significant differences between groups. Linked fate excepted, we do not find that key aspects of Black identity and the Black American experience (i.e., historical knowledge, police contact, church involvement and Black nationalist beliefs) moderate transitional justice attitudes. Our work indicates the promise and limits of information campaigns to mobilize support for transitional justice.

Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)

Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)

Social Insurance Literacy Among the Sick-listed-A Study of Clients' Comprehension and Self-Rated System Comprehensibility of the Sickness Insurance System.

Sickness insurance systems and their processes have been studied in terms of transparency, comprehensibility and fairness, highlighting the importance of just procedures that make sense to clients. Related research demonstrates differences between groups of clients, pointing towards a social gradient. The concept of social insurance literacy and the Social Insurance Literacy Questionnaire (SILQ) was recently developed and serves as a measure for client's ability to obtain, understand and act on information in a sickness insurance system, relating to the comprehensibility of the information that the system provides. The purpose of this study was to investigate social insurance literacy among clients on sick leave and its associations with perceived justice, being granted sickness benefits and background factors. This was a questionnaire study with clients on sick leave in Sweden. In the selection process 3993 clients were invited, of which 1173 recently had their sickness benefits withdrawn. Those who answered the SILQ (n = 1152) also answered a perceived justice measure and accepted sharing register data from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. Data were analyzed through regression analysis. The findings demonstrate that clients' perceptions of system comprehensibility and the status of their sick leave case was significantly associated with perceived justice, and being granted sickness benefits, while their individual abilities to obtain, understand, and act on information had lesser influence. The system's ability to provide understandable information seems more important than clients' abilities to comprehend it. From a client perspective, a just system seems to be related to their experiences of the sick leave process (i,e., whether they had an ongoing or closed case) rather than their skills to obtain the correct information.

PENALTIES NOT RELATED TO IMPRISONMENT IN THE CRIMINAL LEGISLATION OF UZBEKISTAN: CONCEPT, SYSTEM, SPECIFIC ASPECTS

In this article, the author covered the concept, system, specific aspects general of penalties not related to imprisonment according to the criminal legislation of Uzbekistan. The author notes that the system of non-parole-related penalties continues to develop all over the world at the present time. Among them, fines, public works (including correctional work) are especially widely used. It should be noted that the task of developing a system of punishments in which criminal law is not associated with deprivation of Liberty is of urgent importance for Uzbekistan, which is constantly reforming the judicial system. As the main directions of the criminal justice policy implemented in Uzbekistan, the revision of types of crimes according to the level of social danger, the transfer of many serious or extreme crimes established in the criminal law into a category of crimes of greater social risk and less severe severity, the relaxation of the conditions for applying criminal liability measures to persons who first committed, it can be seen in expanding the scope and capabilities of the basis for the application of types of punishment that are not related to the separation of the convicted from society, in improving the procedure for the enforcement of these criminal justice measures.

Rule of Law Backsliding and Memory Politics in Hungary

Introduction of the institutional framework of constitutional democracy and transitional justice in Hungary – Liberal constitutionalism as a victim of the authoritarian efforts of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party after the 2010 parliamentary elections – The legal governance of history contributing to the backsliding of democracy and the rule of law – Use of memory politics for the newly established authoritarian regime’s own political purposes – Transitional justice measures to help reconcile society and consolidate democracy – The current Hungarian government’s attitude towards public discussion of history

An assessment of the condition of flowing waters in predominantly urban areas of the conterminous U.S. and its relationship to measures of environmental justice

Urbanization often leads to environmental degradation and there is a growing concern that these impacts are inequitably distributed. We assessed the condition of urban flowing waters across the conterminous US using data from EPA’s National Rivers and Streams Assessment and tested whether degradation was related to metrics of environmental justice (EJ). We found that urban flowing waters are more degraded than their non-urban counterparts. Indeed, the proportion of the length of the nation’s urban flowing waters in poor condition, based on common environmental quality indicators, was often nearly twice as high as the proportion for the nation’s flowing waters as a whole. The majority of urban waters were in poor ecological condition for water quality integrity, nutrient concentrations, and riparian disturbance although, most were in good ecological condition for riparian vegetation, instream cover, bed sediment, enterococci, and dissolved oxygen. For biological indicators, urban flowing water was mostly in poor condition for both fish (52% of total length) and macroinvertebrate biotic integrity (80% of total length). Despite widespread degradation, we did not find that flowing water degradation was strongly related to the two EJ measures we analyzed (% low income and % minority). The highest correlations we observed (|r|=0.3) were between fish biotic integrity and % low income, and between riparian disturbance and % low income. To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the pervasiveness of urban flowing water degradation and its relationship to EJ on a national scale. While this study did not uncover a compelling association between the studied environmental parameters and income and minority status in the surrounding human population, more research is needed to assess access to healthy rivers and streams for all communities.

‘Caught between a rock and a hard place’

The societal approach towards juvenile offenders have, in a Nordic context, focused on care and treatment rather than punishment. As juvenile delinquency is seen as an ever-increasing problem, the social law efforts have been deemed insufficient by politicians and more emphasis has been placed on measures of criminal justice. Furthermore, procedural regulations have been subject to reform proposals in a repressive direction. At the same time, children’s rights have been strengthened for example by the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child becoming Swedish law.The legal consequences for juvenile offenders are thus a complex field of tension, in the middle of legal areas with often diametrically opposed goals and strategies. The question has also been raised whether juvenile offenders should be dealt with, within an entirely separate system.The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the conflict area and show a development in the legislature on juvenile offenders. Also, the question whether the increasingly repressive measures are compatible with children’s (human) rights is raised. The essay is based on Swedish conditions, but since Swedish legal debate in recent years have been strongly influenced by (sometimes questioned) Danish reforms such as e.g. lowering the age of criminal responsibility and introducing special Youth Crime Boards, Denmark will serve as a natural point of comparison.

Exploring the influence of job demands and resources on organisational justice views in a sample of correctional staff

AbstractThis study examined the influence of job demands (role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload and dangerousness) and job resources (job variety, supervisor structure and training views) on employee perceptions of procedural justice, general perceptions of distributive justice, and specific perceptions of distributive justice. Using a sample of 160 employees at a high‐security prison, the regression analyses found that only demands of role conflict was inversely correlated with procedural justice and both distributive justice measures. Role ambiguity was inversely related to procedural but was not related to either dimension of distributive justice. Furthermore, dangerousness was inversely associated with distributive justice (both general and specific), but it was not correlated with procedural justice. Among the job resources, job variety was positively associated with procedural and both distributive justice measures. Supervisor structure was predictive of procedural but not distributive justice. Role overload, and training views had non‐significant relationships with all the justice measures.

Impairment and Disability Identity and Perceptions of Trust, Respect, and Fairness

Most studies use impaired functioning alone to specify populations with disabilities. However, some people with functional impairments do not identify as disabled. With functional status-based definitions, studies have shown disparate care quality for people with disabilities. To examine whether impairment and disability identity have different associations with perceived health care experiences and explore factors associated with disability identification. This cross-sectional study used a nationally representative survey of US adults conducted from April 20 through May 31, 2021, and analyzed between June 1 and August 31, 2022. Survey participants were 1822 English- or Spanish-speaking adults responding either online or via telephone. Using 8 survey questions, participants were grouped according to presence of impairment and disability identity. Likert scale measures of trust, respect, and fairness (henceforth, procedural justice measures) were dichotomized. Sociodemographic characteristics and rates of procedural justice responses were compared across groups. Multivariable logistic regressions adjusting for baseline characteristics were performed to (1) estimate associations of impairment and disability identity with perceptions of procedural justice and (2) explore factors associated with disability identification. Analyses applied survey weights. Of 6126 individuals invited to participate, 1854 (30.3%) completed the survey. Thirty-two were excluded due to unreportable gender, for a final analytic sample of 1822 participants. Participants with impairments (n = 816; mean [SD] age, 48.1 [17.0] years; 51.2% women, 48.8% men) had worse perceptions on 7 of 10 procedural justice measures (crude) compared with those without impairments (n = 1006; mean [SD] age, 49.6 [18.1] years, 55.1% female, 44.9% male). Among respondents with impairments, those who did (n = 340) vs did not (n = 476) identify as disabled gave better ratings for clinician communication efforts (a lot of effort, 38.8% vs 31.0%) and having health goals understood (understood very or fairly well, 77.2% vs 70.1%) but gave worse ratings for respect (almost never felt inferior or talked down to, 66.1% vs 59.1%). Disability identification was associated with more reports of unfair treatment (31.0% vs 22.4%; adjusted odds ratio, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.12-2.42) and of being unafraid to ask questions or disagree (50.5% vs 40.1%; adjusted odds ratio, 1.51; 95% CI, 1.04-20.19). Income and employment were associated with disability identification. In this cross-sectional survey study of US adults, health care perceptions differed between groups defined by impairment status and disability identity. These findings suggest that, alongside functional measures, health systems should capture disability identity to better address disparities for people with impairments.

Transitional Justice and the Holocaust in Poland

Abstract The Communist seizure of power is generally regarded as the key context of the transitional justice that characterized the prosecution of Nazi criminals and collaborators in postwar Poland, which naturally affected trials related to the Holocaust. Some of the guiding questions of this scholarship have asked the following: Should postwar trials be understood as “real” trials as opposed to staged political trials? To what extent did they allow for an expression of the distinctiveness of the Holocaust? Did the trials help or inhibit the creation of a space for Jewish voices and agency? The current state of research points to two emerging stories of Polish judicial reckoning with the Holocaust “behind the Iron Curtain.” On the one hand, scholars increasingly agree that the trials were not politically orchestrated but were generally conducted in the spirit of the rule of law, comparable to those held in Western European courts. Further, the Polish contribution to the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators is regarded as exceptional and successful in delivering some measure of justice. On the other hand, research into trials of Polish grassroots perpetrators of anti-Jewish crimes points to a failure in reaching a meaningful judicial and societal reckoning.

GEÇMİŞLE YÜZLEŞMEK: AVRUPA BİRLİĞİ SÜRECİNDE ARNAVUTLUK ÖRNEĞİ

Post-communist countries’ processes on their way to the European Union (EU) have extensively proceeded simultaneously with their transition from communism to democracy. The regime change led to a process of “coming to terms with the past” in the sense that these countries took transitional justice measures for the crimes and practices of the former authoritarian regimes. In this regard, Albania is a case worth considering as a part of the current EU enlargement agenda. As a country that was not involved in the ethnic wars between the former Yugoslavian countries, Albania experienced a different historical pace of a communist past with its peculiarities. This article mainly aims to analyse Albania’s coming to terms with its communist past and thus the transitional justice measures implemented in its EU process. The main argument of the article is twofold: First, EU impact was limited when Albania started its transitional justice period in the 1990s. This was due to the fact that progress in the EU process of Albania in terms of EU candidacy was enhanced in the 2000s and the impact of the strict EU conditionality became evident in these years as well. Secondly, the current international circumstances, in which the rivalry between Russia as well as China, and the West is at its peak in the so-called Western Balkans region, could allow Albania to be more closely aligned with the EU, which in turn may provide the necessary conditions for deeper reforms to come to terms with its past.

Memory Activism as Advocacy for Transitional Justice: Memory Laws, Mass Graves and Impunity in Spain

ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice in Spain is still an ongoing process. This article examines the impact of memory laws and the rise of the radical right on transitional justice measures and the historical memory movement in Spain. It contends that the continued application of the 46/1977 Amnesty Law and the campaigning by radical right party Vox to repeal memory laws left a legal vacuum that precipitated interventions by memory activist groups. It is argued that these protest actions are a form of advocacy for participatory transitional justice. The article first focuses on Andalusia’s 2017 memory law and the rise of Vox in the region. Subsequently, it examines the effect of the state’s Democratic Memory Law (2022) on memory and justice measures and argues that both bottom-up approaches by civil society organizations and top-down measures by state actors are essential to transform Spain into a society anchored in the five pillars of transitional justice.

Reasonable adjustment: Is it a way forward to manage diversity and equity issues in vocational education and training?

Literature has highlighted the importance of having a reasonable adjustment approach as a measure of social justice to provide inclusive education for all students. However, the growing globalisation and commercialisation of vocational education and training has tended to encourage provider organisations to use more flexible reasonable adjustments to attract and retain more students in this domain. The framework of this new reasonable adjustment approach expands on the previous reasonable management approach provided to facilitate disadvantaged students. By introducing innovative and flexible teaching and assessment, this notion of reasonable adjustment now incorporates market-like efforts to secure more income in the form of fees from students. However, there remains unanswered the question of how flexible the reasonable adjustment should be. This paper questions whether achieving a more diverse student population has delivered anything of value to the students who are making up that greater diversity. Perhaps the notion of reasonableness has been applied with too narrow a focus on a reasonable diversity of student entry characteristics, rather than also embracing their learning attainment and subsequent workplace success. Reasonable adjustment may well be a way forward, but perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the concept of reasonableness before that can happen.

Contending Temporalities: Stretching the Temporal Reach of Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe

As part of de-Communization, states in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union used lustration measures to remove Communist officials and secret police collaborators from positions of power and to bring to light Communist-era abuses. As a form of transitional justice, lustration is unusually temporally tethered to the Communist past. However, in practice some states stretched lustration’s temporal parameters, reaching back up to eighty years to pre-Soviet and Nazi World War II (WWII) abuses, and extending forward decades into the post-Communist present. This temporal stretching expanded lustration’s goals beyond vetting mechanism to corruption fighter, historical memory marker, and nation-state (re)builder. Lustration’s temporal stretching conflicts with Venice Commission, Council of Europe, and European Court of Human Rights guidelines and legal rulings on lustration. This article presents three temporal approaches to the window of time covered by lustration in eleven post-Communist states between 1990 and 2018: lustration focused on a single, elongated Communist past, lustration covering multiple pasts, and lustration spanning both Communist and post-Communist abuses. Comparative cases in these three temporal categories illustrate significant variation within states surrounding the temporal purview of lustration. This regional variation is juxtaposed with Council of Europe guidelines, related court rulings, and Venice Commission amicus briefs to illustrate contending temporalities surrounding the use of lustration as an “extraordinary” justice measure in consolidated democracies. This study highlights the importance of time as a variable and invites more empirical work on the conditional effects of time on transitional justice.

Revitalizing Justice: Empowering Juvenile Sexual Offenders through a Restorative Approach in Indonesia

Sexual offense is a serious crime which could pose significant negative impacts on personal level and community. When committed by minors, sexual offense becomes a much more complicated problem and raises many different intricacies. Despite being a popular topic within the legal sphere, restorative justice in Indonesia still has research gap, particularly on the focus of applying restorative justice measures for juvenile sexual offenders. The purpose of this research is to address this research gap and analyze the potentials of using the restorative justice approach to deal with sexual offense cases committed by minors, with the focus of impacts, recovery, and preventing future recidivism. Using the normative legal research method his research dives into the Indonesian legal system to uncover the legal problems that may hinder or discourage people from using this approach, despite the potentials benefits it possesses. Through the statutory approach, this research finds the links within the relevant laws and regulations that may or may not support the use of restorative justice approach to deal with juvenile sexual offenders. The analysis of this finds that the restorative justice approach is indeed beneficial and can help Indonesia in dealing with this issue by not only focusing on delivering justice and recovery the victims, but also holding offenders responsible without sacrificing their youth development and their future.

How to translate justice theory into urban transport metrics? Synchronic assessment of Latin American cities based on equality, priority and sufficiency

This article seeks to carry out a study on the measurement of justice in transportation through the introduction of original metrics of justice that consider different currencies (travel time, energy consumption, PM emissions and NOₓ emissions) and principles of justice (Equality, Priority and Sufficiency), relying on available data from five metropolitan regions in Latin America. Based on available data from five metropolitan regions in Latin America (Brasília, Ciudad de México, Montevideo, Santiago, and São Paulo), this manuscript seeks to reduce the theoretical gap in the transport literature through the development of metrics of distributive justice based on existing Origin-Destination transport surveys, which is expected to identify the characteristics that seem to govern a fairer transport system, as well as to inform practitioners and policy makers about the conditions driving fairer urban environments. In addition to contributions to the evaluation of transport policies with data from developing countries, the discussions presented in this paper intend to provide insights into the major role of selecting the principles of justice and the distributed resources to evaluate the degrees of fairness in transportation systems.