Transitional Justice System Research Articles

Garantías del derecho a la verdad y del acceso a la información en la justicia transicional en América Latina

El texto analiza las bases internacionales y constitucionales del derecho a la verdad en un régimen de justicia de transición, vinculándolo con el derecho de acceso a la información en poder del Estado. En busca de la efectividad de un régimen de transición, el autor destaca la necesidad de que las autoridades públicas responsables de las comisiones de la verdad u organismos garantes del acceso a la información, sean dotados de facultades para actuar con independencia. El texto también propone, alternativamente, que el legislador, siempre que le sea posible, indique ejemplos de expresiones como “seguridad nacional” e “interés público”, frecuentemente consideradas como obstáculos para el derecho de acceso a la información y el acceso a la verdad, por autoridades administrativas que carecen de independencia, de modo que se sientan más vinculadas a una exégesis literal de las normas, reduciéndoles el margen de actuación (de discrecionalidad y de apreciación) y, finalmente, proporcionando una mayor seguridad jurídica y, en cualquier caso, la credibilidad del sistema en general

Mass Media and the Search for Transitional Justice in Nigeria

The concept “transitional justice” describes a policy that corrects past wrongs of a country by identifying and punishing perpetrators of the wrongs. Transitional justice systems have enabled many countries of the world to effectively deal with national challenging issues similar to those of Nigeria such as corruption, injustice, bad governance, human rights abuse, internal conflicts (ethnic, religious, communal, sectional in nature, etc), intolerance, and dysfunctional multiculturalism. There is the urgent need for a system of transitional justice in Nigeria to assist address the above challenges and more that stand in the way of the country’s development. The mass media, as a social institution expected to contribute to the smooth running of the society, have a crucial role to play in the establishment and sustenance of a system of transitional justice in Nigeria. This article articulates a realistic role for the mass media in this regard. This role is in the form of advocacy journalism, agenda setting, community broadcasting and the effective use of new media. The articulation takes into cognizance the hostile operational environment and challenges confronting mass media practice in Nigeria, and suggests that for the mass media institution to effectively discharge this role, it has to distance itself from unprofessionalism and unethical practices, train and retrain journalists for this task, and imbibe the culture of investigative journalism and democratic approaches to mass media operation.

The Intensity of the Rwandan Genocide: Measures from the Gacaca Records

This article illustrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly skewed and contain a non-negligible number of outlying observations. A number of genocide proxies are subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain a genocide index, and the effect of survival bias on this index is reduced by augmenting the set of genocide proxies subjected to PCA with the distance from an administrative sector to the nearest mass grave. Finally, the administrative sectors are divided into distinct categories of low, moderate and high genocide intensity by means of Local Indicators of Spatial Auto-Correlation (LISA) that allow identifying significant high-high and low-low clusters of genocide intensity.

Constitutionalism and transitional justice in South Africa

Andrea Lollini's intellectual contribution...offers important and interesting points of departure on a plurality of issues and disciplines that are rooted in established academic culture but that may also anticipate the outcome of future research. * [From the Foreword] Over the last fifteen years, the South African postapartheid Transitional Amnesty Process - implemented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) - has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators from around the world and from almost every discipline of human sciences. Lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists as well as political scientists have tried to understand, describe and comment on the 'shocking' South African political decision to give amnesty to all who fully disclosed their politically motivated crimes committed during the apartheid era. Investigating the postapartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the postapartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems. Both processes contain mechanisms that encourage the constitution of the unity of the political body while ensuring future solidity and stability. From this perspective, the book deals with the importance of several concepts such as truth about the past, publicly shared memory, unity of the political body and public confession.

The Intensity of the Rwandan Genocide: Fine Measures from the Gacaca Records

This article demonstrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly skewed and contain a non-negligible number of outlying observations. After deriving nine proxies of genocide intensity from the data, various sets of these proxies are subjected to skewness-adjusted Robust Principal Component Analysis (ROBPCA), yielding four distinct continuous indices of genocide intensity. The effect of survival bias on these indices is reduced by augmenting the set of genocide proxies subjected to ROBPCA with the distance from an administrative sector to the nearest mass grave. Finally, the administrative sectors are divided into distinct categories of low, moderate and high genocide intensity by means of Local Indicators of Spatial Auto-Correlation (LISA) that allow identifying significant high-high and low-low clusters of genocide intensity.

Waking the Dead of the Spanish Civil War - Judge Baltasar Garzon and the Spanish Law of Historical Memory

This article considers the controversial proceedings against Baltasar Garzon, Spain’s best-known judge. These proceedings and Garzon's own investigations of the crimes of the Franco era have thrown up a large number of issues about the retrospective application of transitional justice to conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War, apparently consigned to history. To what extent can an amnesty passed in 1977 cover serious international crimes such as crimes against humanity, when these were perhaps not clearly defined at the time they were committed? Is Spain's amnesty for its own past crimes consistent with the assumption of universal jurisdiction for equivalent crimes committed abroad? Is it enough to deal with historical memory by administrative means under the 2007 Law of historical Memory or are victims entitled to justice as well as truth and reparation? Above all the article tries to answer the question whether a conflict can really be resolved without a transitional justice system in which the victims feel they have participated.

Justice and Peace? – The Role of Law in Resolving Colombia's Civil Conflict

AbstractThe Colombian Parliament's Justice and Peace law of 2005, introduced by the government of President Alvaro Uribe, allows members of armed groups involved in Colombia's 40-year old conflict to re-enter civilian life by paying an alternative penalty of 5-8 years' prison, even where their crimes concern mass-murder. The process is conditional on a full confession and the proper recompense for the victims. The Law however benefits primarily the pro-state paramilitaries, as the left-wing guerrilla groups have yet to make peace, and has thus been described as a transitional justice system without the transition. This article considers the provisions of the 2005 law against the background of the Constitutional Court's 2006 decision on its validity and the requirements of international criminal law and human rights law. It considers whether it satisfies the requirements of the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over Colombia's conflict but with an opt-out till 2009 for war-crimes. Will the process resolve the problem of Colombia's "impunity" – the failure to prosecute paramilitary crimes - which has been condemned by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights? In conclusion it compares the process to other transitional justice systems in South Africa and Northern Ireland.

Establishing collective norms: Potentials for participatory justice in Rwanda.

In June 2002, the Republic of Rwanda embarked on an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, inaugurating the pilot phase of a new participatory justice system called Inkiko-Gacaca. This article-the result of 8 weeks of research involving interviews with government and nongovernmental organization officials, local judges, and prisoners, and extensive observations of the Inkiko-Gacaca process in several different rural communities-explores the system's potential for healing inter-group conflict through a collaborative process of establishing common social and moral norms. The historical and theoretical background of Inkiko-Gacaca is followed by an in-depth case study of 3 communities. Relating intergroup contact theory to the actual experiences of Rwandans participating in this transitional justice system, we emphasize the need to revise the theory's often-implied assumption of homogeneity in participant perspectives. This analysis illustrates 4 very different levels of trust at which Rwandans par...