Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Justice occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, followed by North America, Africa, MENA and Asia with comparatively smaller contributions. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are NGO, NGO_Fed, IGO, RC and RE organisations.

NGO, NGO_Fed, IGO, RC and RE documents provide the greatest number of occurrences, primarily from activity reports published in Europe.

Transitional justice is recognized as essential for countries recovering from conflict or repressive rule. Rooted in the rights to justice, truth, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence, transitional justice mechanisms constitute a comprehensive approach to combating impunity, ensuring accountability for past human rights violations, redress for victims of violations of human rights and advancing broader institutional reform necessary to address the root causes of strife and conflict.

How would you describe transitional justice and its role in conflict resolution? Transitional justice refers to a range of policies or mechanisms that may advance accountability and reconciliation for serious rights abuses in a country’s past. Following an armed conflict, there may be a great number of victims, as well as accused perpetrators, that need some form of attention, accountability, or redress. While prosecution of wrongdoers in the courts may be desired, it is usually not possible for all cases, given weak judicial systems and the large number of persons who may be complicit in serious crimes. Thus, accountability and redress may also be pursued through a broad truth- seeking process, such as a truth commission, or through providing reparations to individual victims or affected communities. Finally, reform of the judiciary, police, and military may be needed. All of these topics might be broached in the process of mediating a peace agreement, and may feature in a final agreement either in specific or general terms. Ideally, broad principles and commitments will be reached, allowing a longer term process of consulting victim communities and the public on exactly what kind of mechanisms would be ideal. There is no one model to follow; each initiative must be uniquely crafted for each society.

Credible transitional justice and accountability mechanisms can help countries address legacies of abuse in ways that enable them to move forward nonviolently. In practice, transitional justice refers to a range of tools–judicial and non-judicial, formal and informal, retributive and restorative–that aim to support and strengthen peace, security, development, reconciliation, and governance through carefully balancing sometimes competing imperatives, including the desire for truth, accountability, reparative justice, institutional reform, and reconciliation. Together, these measures can help a society address and heal from the past and prevent atrocities recurring in the future.

The restitution of housing, land and property rights after conflicts and periods of non-democratic governance are fundamental aspects of transitional justice which are essential for the achievement of durable solutions to forced displacement, and to broader concerns of peace, reconciliation and economic prosperity.

The plan envisages a comprehensive approach to transitional justice in Afghanistan and has five elements: symbolic measures, institutional reform, truth-seeking and documentation, reconciliation and accountability.

A model Transitional Justice curriculum is developed and launched In partnership with National Curriculum and Development Centre (NCDC), a model Transitional Justice curriculum for lower secondary school was developed as a means to engage young people in schools to understand how past conflict legacy affects national reconciliation, and to equip learners with knowledge and skills to address such legacies.

The chart below represents the distribution of justice between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences. It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.

The work of the programme has shown that current and future transitional justice and post-conflict development interventions will need to be more context appropriate and conflict sensitive if they are to be effective.

Key Lesson Learnt Transitional Justice does not always require regime change and indeed, it can be de-linked from state level governance changes. However, doing transitional justice in such contexts requires multisectoral engagements, and innovative civil society leadership

The importance of legal prosecution of war crimes was widely recognised by the various protagonists for transitional justice. At the same time, they were united in their view that criminal justice alone cannot pave the way for reconciliation. Civil-society actors, in particular, promote additional approaches: Restorative forms of justice and truth-finding. The NGO-driven campaign for a regional commission for truth-seeking and truthtelling about war crimes in former Yugoslavia (REKOM) offers potential in this regard. However, the problem remains that initiatives at the political level and at the societal level tend to run parallel to each other, rather than being interlinked.

Where do you see the field of transitional justice focussing in the future? It has been broadening in the last years, incorporating issues of economic development, peace- building, ‘identity’ and conflict, and other areas. All of these are relevant and useful, but it may now be the time for the field to consolidate, and to strengthen some of its core areas. Second, I believe that justice experts might perhaps be more self-critical of the impact of justice initiatives, and more regularly undertake an honest assessment of outcomes. Finally, and most importantly for HD, we may see a deepening in the understanding of peace mediation and peace processes more generally, including a sober look at ‘peace and justice’ issues, when questions of accountability emerge at the peace table.

Victims fight back Human rights violations often go unpunished, even once the dictators responsible and their supporters have been ousted from power. If processes of transitional justice do take place, these are often technocratic and top-down. Hivos and its strategic partner Impunity Watch have spent years working to shift the focus back to the victims and survivors of human rights abuses. In this effort we support concrete actions taken by victims' groups, such as lawsuits against perpetrators, and we lobby the international judicial system to revise their approach.

In an immediate post-conflict context, there may be distinct opportunities to progress justice and accountability. However, transitional justice approaches may not always address the deep-seated causes and consequences of victimisation. Furthermore, the political context in which such measures are developed may result in ad hoc or partial responses which may not always result in effective and adequate forms of reparation.