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11. ‘A Drop of Water on a Hot Stone:’ Justice for Victims in the Central African Republic

Author:
Rim El Gantri and Arnaud Yaliki
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
The Central African Republic (CAR) has endured six decades of violent conflict, which has fractured the country and weakened the state’s ability to provide not only justice but also basic services. Victims of human rights violations, especially those outside the capital Bangui, often belong to profoundly marginalized communities. Their victimhood is thus aggravated by daily struggles of exclusion, inequality, and the absence of alternatives. This research report examines the notion of justice and its feasibility from the perspective of a victim-centered approach in a context of profound fragility and extreme poverty. The first section of the report gives an overview of the contextual challenges to providing justice to victims, including the ongoing violent conflict and widespread human rights violations, polarization, lack of inclusion, social norms, and the exclusion of young people from decision-making processes. These obstacles, which deepen the justice gap, are generally not taken into consideration when designing justice measures and initiatives. The second section describes existing justice initiatives and those currently being established in CAR, including judicial and non-judicial mechanisms and those administered by national and international bodies. However, high operating costs, dysfunction, corruption, and centralization of services in the capital severely tend to limit the ability of these initiatives to deliver justice to victims. The third section discusses victims’ demands and aspirations for justice based on their experiences and priorities. It sheds light on the need for meaningful participation of victims, members of marginalized communities, and civil society representatives, among others, in justice initiatives in order to ensure their legitimacy and facilitate their implementation. Garnering such broad participation requires engaging, unifying, and impactful communication and outreach strategies. The report concludes with a set of conclusions and recommendations that acknowledge the challenges in providing justice to victims in a fragile context like CAR and highlight innovative transitional justice strategies in which victims are the cornerstone.
Topic:
Reform, Youth, Criminal Justice, Memory, Institutions, Engagement, Reparations, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Africa and Central African Republic

12. Transitional Justice and Prevention: Summary Findings from Five Country Case Studies

Author:
Roger Duthie
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
This report summarizes the findings of an ICTJ research project exploring the role that transitional justice can play in preventing both massive and serious violations of human rights as well as violence and violent conflict more broadly. Its conclusions are drawn from case studies of five countries—Colombia, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone—representing a range of complex contexts in which societies are grappling with violent conflicts, repressive governments, or acute inequality. It argues that transitional justice should be an integral element of conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and sustainable development. The report contends that transitional justice can contribute to prevention by: (1) addressing the exclusion and other harms that victims experience due to human rights violations they suffered; (2) addressing the exclusion and related injustices that communities and social groups face as a result of targeted violations and structural marginalization; (3) strengthening the rule of law and making it more inclusive; and (4) catalyzing the reform of institutions and laws that have perpetuated violence and discrimination as a means to exclude marginalized groups. The report also identifies a number of limitations to the preventive impact of transitional justice, including: (1) tensions that can exist between justice and prevention initiatives, especially in the short term; (2) justice processes that may be seen to be insufficiently participatory or even exclusionary themselves; (3) a lack of implementation of measures and reforms that are designed or recommended; and (4) contextual factors such political dynamics, security concerns, and the absence of broader structural change. The report concludes that applying a prevention lens to transitional justice does not fundamentally change how the field is understood, but it does have broad policy implications. First, fostering inclusion should be a primary objective of both the outcomes and the design of transitional justice mechanisms. Second, assessing the preventive role of transitional justice requires a long-term approach to inclusion and reform as these involve changes to social relationships, institutions, and structures. Third, prevention requires a society to confront both the root causes and consequences of injustice, and transitional justice processes can contribute greatly in this regard. However, they alone are not enough.
Topic:
Reform, Transitional Justice, Criminal Justice, Memory, Institutions, Reparations, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Africa, Middle East, Asia, South America, North Africa, North America, Sierra Leone, Morocco, Peru, and Oceania

13. Setting an Agenda for Sustainable Peace: Transitional Justice and Prevention in Colombia

Author:
María Cielo Linares
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
This study examines the preventive impact of transitional justice mechanisms created in Colombia before the 2016 peace agreement, namely the 2005 Peace and Justice Law and the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law. It finds that transitional justice has contributed to prevention in a number of ways, including by: (1) improving institutional responses for victims of human rights violations and creating spaces for participation; (2) adding issues to the public agenda, such as those related to economic and political networks supporting armed groups and the need to address the plundering of land; (3) developing a culture of awareness and respect for human rights; and (4) strengthening leadership within victims’ communities and facilitating the reintegration of victims into public life. The report also concludes, however, that these transitional justice processes have not done all that they could to promote the structural social changes necessary to resolve the underlying violent dynamics, especially in matters of inequity and discrimination, leaving the door open for future violence. Little progress has been made in addressing economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights violations, and insufficient attention has been paid to gender and ethnic discrimination. Where progress has been made in areas such as land restitution and participation, it has been limited by a lack of coordination between the national and local levels, a dearth of political will, and an ensuing failure of implementation. The study demonstrates that pursuing transitional justice in contexts of ongoing violence requires coordination between the justice and security sectors that depends on a holistic view of security and sustainable development. Additionally, it suggests that transitional justice processes have to work in tandem with the institutions set up to more directly address the structural problems of inequity and inequality. Finally, it contends that promoting the rights to truth, justice, reparation, and nonrecurrence requires a strategy to comprehensively address the associated demands and expectations.
Topic:
Reform, Criminal Justice, Memory, Institutions, Peace, Reparations, Gender, Atrocity Prevention, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Colombia and South America

14. Moving from Mirage to Reality: Transitional Justice and Prevention in Morocco

Author:
Mustapha Hadji
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
This study examines how transitional justice in Morocco has contributed to the prevention of serious human rights violations, mainly related to state violence and repression and social and economic exclusion. Beginning in the 1990s, Morocco’s a constitutional monarchy engaged in a process of liberalization that included efforts to address past grave human rights violations. In the 2000s, these efforts centered on the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER), a truth-telling initiative that recommended and helped bring about other transitional justice processes such as reparations, the preservation of memory, and a series of institutional and legal reforms intended to prevent the recurrence of those violations. Despite the political liberalization that was underway, Morocco’s transitional justice efforts were not undertaken in a context of regime change. Morocco’s experience nevertheless suggests that limited political reform can have real but restricted impact on the prevention of human rights violations. As a truth-telling measure, the IER diagnosed some of the wrongdoings of the past and called for reform to prevent their recurrence. Reparations provided important benefits to victims that had improved inclusion, while collective reparations drew attention to regional exclusion and inequality. Beginning in 2011, a new constitution facilitated institutional and legal reforms that had been recommended by the IER, many of which included the protection of human rights. The fact that the regime that was responsible for past human rights violations remained in control of the transitional justice processes—and at the same time it was perpetrating abuses in the name of anti-terrorism—however, has undermined the legitimacy of those processes and constrained their preventive impact. While the Moroccan monarchy may have no desire to return to the widespread repression of the Years of Lead, the persistence of human rights violations, corruption, inequality, and social unrest in the country suggests that a transitional justice approach that is more comprehensive and inclusive and, in the end, more fully implemented has the potential to make a greater contribution to preventing future wrongs.
Topic:
Human Rights, Reform, Memory, Institutions, Reparations, Atrocity Prevention, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
North Africa and Morocco

15. Fighting antisemitism should not be Israel’s primary concern

Author:
Efraim Inbar
Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS)
Abstract:
Fighting with Poland over Holocaust restitution is not in Israel’s national interest.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Holocaust, Conflict, Memory, and Reparations
Political Geography:
Europe, Middle East, Israel, and Poland

16. Truth and justice initiatives in non-transitional contexts: experiences from Latin America

Author:
Victória Monteiro da Silva Santos
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
BRICS Policy Center
Abstract:
By tracing concepts such as truth, justice, reparations, and nonrepeats, as well as models such as the International Commission against Impunity, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, and the Truth Commission, the article discusses some of the ways in which a diversity actors sought to address and transform the complex patterns of organized violence that routinely impact various Latin American societies.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Transitional Justice, Justice, Reconciliation, Truth, and Reparations
Political Geography:
Colombia, Latin America, and Mexico

17. A Mixed Approach to International Crimes: The Retributive and Restorative Justice Procedures of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace

Author:
Anna Myriam Roccatello and Elizabeth Rojas
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
In June 2019, ICTJ hosted an intense week of meetings with various members of the SJP, along with former combatants of the Public Forces of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), and the victims of Colombia’s conflict. ICTJ Colombia routinely meets with these stakeholders as part of its work, but the aim of this week was to specifically include various international experts on restorative and transitional justice: Professor John Braithwaite, Professor Adolfo Ceretti, Professor Roberto Cornelli, Maria Camila Moreno Múnera, and Anna Myriam Roccatello. This report is the result of these fruitful meeting with the stakeholders in the Colombian peace process. Chapter 1 of this report gives an overview of the SJP’s innovative model, which can be considered a mixed restorative-retributive judicial organ. It also examines the potential value of such a mixed procedural approach, in comparison with the failures of purely retributive justice processes to achieve the specific aims of criminal accountability in a transitional justice context. Chapter 2 examines some of the various challenges for restorative justice in general. For convenience, those challenges have been divided into five categories: victims, perpetrators, judges, communications, and due process. Chapter 3 suggests various principles that the SJP should consider to help realize some of its restorative justice aims, while Chapter 4 suggests some specific procedures that the SJP may implement to achieve those restorative justice principles. Those readers who are familiar with transitional justice, the Colombian peace process, and the SJP may wish to skip Chapters 1 and 2 and move directly to the recommendations in Chapters 3 and 4. Finally, the report concludes with reflections on some challenges of the mixed approach and offers some general suggestions for how to move forward.
Topic:
Reform, Criminal Justice, Institutions, Reparations, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Colombia and South America

18. Truth, Accountability, and Asset Recovery: How Transitional Justice Can Fight Corruption

Author:
Ruben Carranza
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
On March 2 and 3, 2020, two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a COVID-19 global pandemic, transitional justice and anti-corruption policymakers, experts, and activists from the Gambia, Kenya, South Africa and Armenia met with their counterparts in Tunisia for a two-day conference entitled, “Truth, Accountability and Asset Recovery: How Transitional Justice Can Fight Corruption,” organized by ICTJ with the support of Tunisia’s National Anti-Corruption Commission (INLUCC) and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany. This diverse group of leaders came together to share solutions to a common problem: How can countries emerging from dictatorship, war, or political transitions hold corrupt ex-rulers accountable, recover their ill-gotten assets, and ensure that those harmed the most by human rights violations and large-scale corruption can achieve justice, obtain reparations, and overcome marginalization? For many countries pursuing transitional justice, including those represented by participants in the conference, the health and economic impact of the pandemic has made it more urgent to find and design solutions that advance accountability for both human rights violations and corruption. In Kenya, for example, citizens questioned the government’s use of $12 million in COVID-19-related aid from the World Bank, “amid reports that the lockdown intended to curb the spread of the virus had worsened poverty, even forcing a mother to cook stones to make her eight children believe she was preparing food for them.” In Tunisia, INLUCC “identified 11 instances of suspected corruption and conflicts of interest” related to a government deal to acquire millions of facemasks. At the conference, participants brought up the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in enabling corruption during dictatorship or in facilitating state capture through privatization. Ninety-seven human rights and anti-corruption groups have jointly reminded the IMF, which has offered loans to pandemic-hit countries even as it continues to set austerity as a condition, that “transparency and accountability are key to making sure the money the IMF is disbursing actually goes to protecting lives and livelihoods.” This report gives an overview of the conference and its five panel discussions. It presents the thematic questions posed in each panel and summarizes the panelists’ statements and the comments and questions from moderators, other panelists, and participants in the audience. By design, the premise of the conference was clear: The practice by mainly global South countries of including accountability for corruption in their transitional justice processes has settled the debate over whether accountability for corruption should be part of transitional justice. In 2008, the Kenya Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission began investigating land-grabbing, large-scale corruption, and violations of economic and social rights. Soon after the Arab Spring in 2011-2012, Tunisia took the most significant steps when it established the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC) with a mandate that covered violent political repression as well as corruption under former President Ben Ali. In its recently released final report, the commission examines the extent of the corruption and how the development policies and austerity measures imposed by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF enabled it. In 2016, the post-dictatorship government in the Gambia created a truth commission to examine human rights violations as well as a separate commission of inquiry to investigate ex-dictator Yahya Jammeh’s corruption and identify his ill-gotten wealth. The latter commission is now considering using part of those assets to fund reparations. Although corruption was excluded from the mandate of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, activists in 2017 created the People’s Tribunal on Economic Crime that linked the continuity of post-apartheid corruption to the failure to address it in earlier transitional justice processes. In 2018, the South African government then created the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture to investigate specific economic crimes during and after apartheid. After the 2018 revolution in Armenia that ended a decade of authoritarian rule in the post-Soviet state, the new government embarked on prosecutions for corruption and human rights violations and is now considering a truth commission that would examine specific cases of corruption and human rights violations since 1991. These processes informed the conference, and the panelists who were directly involved in them discussed the challenges, successes, and lessons learned. This report’s original intent was to highlight the most important lessons from these experiences and promote South-South exchanges on transitional justice and accountability for corruption. However, the unprecedented global pandemic during which the conference took place has given it another equally relevant purpose. As ICTJ pointed out in a recent special report on COVID-19, “The pandemic is bringing to the surface underlying inequalities, including the unequal access to health care.” With this in mind, the author hopes this report will also offer policymakers practical approaches to transitional justice that can help address those underlying inequalities, such as measures aimed at improving access to health care for the most vulnerable, and initiatives to use recovered ill-gotten assets to fund reparations for victims.
Topic:
Corruption, Reform, Criminal Justice, Institutions, Reparations, COVID-19, and Truth and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Kenya, Europe, Armenia, North Africa, Tunisia, Gambia, and Africa

19. Building Blocks for Reparations: Providing Interim Relief to Victims Through Targeted Development Assistance

Author:
Sarah Kasande Kihika and Eva Kallweit
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Abstract:
The armed conflict in Northern Uganda, stretching across more than two decades, greatly affected the populations of Northern Uganda, which suffered multiple forms of war crimes and gross abuses of human rights. Violations included forced displacement, pillaging, looting and destruction of property, abduction, forced recruitment, slavery, forced marriage, sexual violence, psychological harms, mutilation, killings, torture, and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. These violations have had long-term social and economic consequences for victims, affecting and impairing their functionality, livelihoods, schooling, physical and mental health, social skills, self-esteem, and interpersonal relations in the post-conflict period, with differential impacts on men, women, boys, and girls. This study assesses the opportunities for providing interim relief to victims of conflict-related human rights violations through targeted development programs, pending the establishment of a comprehensive reparations program. Reparations are a response to gross human rights violations, meant to provide redress in its many forms, including compensation to victims. Development assistance differs from reparations in that it is aimed at improving the general socioeconomic conditions of citizens more broadly. This report acknowledges the distinctions between reparations and development, while exploring intersections between the two that could be optimized to address the urgent needs of victims of human rights violations. It identifies substantive and practical considerations that government authorities at the national and local levels should take into account when designing and implementing reconstruction and development programs, and it proposes ways to maximize the potential of ongoing programs to address the immediate needs of victims and mitigate the effects of the abuses they endured. Finally, the study explains how existing recovery and development programs could increase victims’ access, improve their implementation modalities, and address the various challenges and gaps that limit programs’ effectiveness. If they are appropriately designed, local recovery and reconstruction programs can form a foundation upon which reparative approaches can be based and built in the future.
Topic:
Human Rights, Reform, Transitional Justice, and Reparations
Political Geography:
Uganda and Africa

20. Racial Inequality

Author:
Lisa D. Cook and Trevon Logan
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP)
Abstract:
The origins of American capitalism in the institutions of slavery continues to cast a long shadow. As the economist William Darity Jr. has written, the dead hand of history weighs heavily on us because the dead hand of history remains fitfully alive. Contemporary racial inequality can be thought of as the product of a long historical process with at least two reinforcing sets of policies. The first would be policies governing the spatial distribution of the black population. The second would be policies that had a disparate impact on black individuals because of their locations. Understanding current black-white gaps in income, wealth and education require understanding the complex relationship between regional inequality, race and policies at the local, state, and national levels. In this article, we outline the ways that the spatial distribution of the black population has evolved over time and the ways that spatial distribution has interacted with policy to, at times, reduce and exacerbate levels of inequality. Recognizing the ways that past policies explicitly stymied black economic mobility and how current policies have explicitly or inadvertently done the same provides a basis for understanding how to craft future policies to reduce racial inequalities. Furthermore, recognizing the interconnection of discrimination and the spatial distribution of the black population is important for understanding certain components of regional and spatial inequality. The difference in location within regions makes it inevitable that policies that differentially affect urban and rural areas will have disparate effects by race. A recent example of this is the proposed Medicaid work requirement in Michigan. The original version of Michigan Senate Bill 897 exempted individuals from this work requirement conditional on residing in a county with an unemployment rate above 8.5 percent. The spatial distribution of the white and black populations of Michigan meant that this exemption would have racially disparate impacts; given that poor white individuals disproportionately live in rural areas and black individuals live in urban areas, the higher unemployment rates in rural counties would disproportionately exempt white Medicaid recipients from the work requirement within the bill. Although—after considerable negative press—the exemption was dropped from the final version of the work requirement bill, this incident reveals the complex interplay between policy, inequality across space, and inequality between races. Even if a policy like the unemployment rate exemption in the Michigan bill is crafted without discriminatory intent, it can nonetheless increase racial inequality. In the following sections we explore the how policy has shaped the geographic and economic mobility of the black population over the past century and a half, drawing from the large literatures on regional inequality and racial discrimination that have all too often been treated in isolation from one another.
Topic:
Economics, Race, Capitalism, Inequality, Slavery, Macroeconomics, Reparations, Racism, and Systemic Racism
Political Geography:
United States