scholarly journals Thinking Systemically About Transitional Justice, Legal Systems, and Resilience

2021 ◽  
pp. 530-550
Author(s):  
Janine Natalya Clark
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Resilience Thinking ◽  
Systemic Impact ◽  
Resilience Framework ◽  
The Impact

Transitional justice refers to the set of judicial and non-judicial processes that societies may use to deal with legacies of past human rights abuses and atrocities. While the field is rapidly expanding, to date there are almost no systematic analyses of transitional justice within a resilience framework, or vice versa. The purpose of this chapter is to address that gap and to demonstrate why resilience is highly relevant for transitional justice theory and practice. It argues that resilience thinking can enhance the impact of transitional justice on the ground, by contributing to the development of more ecological approaches to dealing with the past that locate individuals within their broader social environments. The chapter also reflects on the conceptual and empirical utility of resilience as a concept that opens up a space for analyzing the wider societal and systemic impact of legal systems more generally.

The Suharto Case

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 214-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiwon Suh
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Study Team ◽  
Political Capabilities ◽  
The Impact

How could Suharto avoid prosecution for human rights abuses? For a preliminary answer, this paper provides an account of a specific and observable failure: The failure of the Suharto study team, a Komnas-HAM (National Commission of Human Rights) initiative to put the atrocities of the Suharto era on the human rights court track. It begins with prosecutorial approaches toward past abuses and a lack of coordination over transitional justice strategies in Indonesia as the background to Suharto’s non-prosecution. Then, it proceeds to trace the Suharto study team’s life in 2003 until its defeat. The fate of the Suharto team highlights the dilemma of timing between public attention and political capabilities in transitional justice. Five years after Suharto stepped down, legacies from the past prevented progress in the case, while the impact was far from explosive when new commissioners of the Komnas-HAM finally announced the findings of gross violations in 2012.

scholarly journals Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Duncan Light ◽  
Remus Creţan ◽  
Andreea-Mihaela Dunca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Young People ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Memorial Museums ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Impact

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change.

Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Resilience Framework ◽  
Post War

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.

Domestic Investigation and Prosecution of Atrocities Committed during Military Operations: The Impact of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-404
Author(s):  
Silvia Borelli
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Remedial Measures ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
Proactive Approach ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Impact

The undeniable impact of the European Convention on Human Rights on the legal systems – and the wider society – of Member States of the Council of Europe would not have been possible without its unique monitoring system, centred around the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The present article assesses the extent to which the European Court's judgments that have found violations of the procedural obligations under Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention to investigate unlawful killings, disappearances, acts of torture or other ill-treatment have, in fact, led to an improvement in the capability of the domestic legal systems of states parties to ensure accountability for such abuses. On the basis of four case studies, it is concluded that the European Court's judgments, coupled with the supervisory powers of the Committee of Ministers, have the potential to make a very great impact on the capability of domestic legal systems to deal with gross violations of fundamental human rights, and have led to clear and positive changes within the domestic legal systems of respondent states. Nevertheless, this is by no means always the case, and it is suggested that, in order for the Convention system to achieve its full potential in the most politically charged cases, the European Court should adopt a more proactive approach to its remedial powers by ordering specific remedial measures, to include in particular the opening or reopening of investigations.

Linking Transitional Justice and Human Rights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Waltz
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
International Treaties ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Human Rights Standards ◽  
Economic Injustice ◽  
The Arab Spring

Chapter 3, by Susan Waltz, addresses several of these challenges as well as other themes in a distinct way, drawing upon experiences before and after the Arab Spring from several countries in the region including Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. She first draws attention to the apparent gaps between a set of universal human rights standards enshrined in international treaties, the practice of transitional justice with its focus on gross human rights abuses, and the expectations which have been raised of transitional justice, including of addressing questions of economic injustice. She then interrogates different facets of the problem of “impact” of transitional justice.

scholarly journals On Corporate Responsibility, Human Rights, and Transitional Justice: Quo Vadis?

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 324-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruti Teitel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Quo Vadis

The 2018 ASIL panel on the question of corporate responsibility and human rights, and in particular, my remarks on corporate responsibility and transitional justice, preceded a long-awaited United States Supreme Court decision on the question of whether foreign corporate responsibility for human rights abuses belonged in United States courts ending in a closely decided vote—dividing sharply along political lines, with the Court conservatives in splintered opinions deciding against such liability. A forceful dissent by the four liberals on the Court would have allowed the Alien Tort Claims Act (ACTA) claim to go forward.

Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Cheryl Lawther
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Transmission Of Trauma

This article explores practices of haunting and ghosting after conflict-related loss. This is not to suggest a focus on the occult or the paranormal, but to use these phenomena as a prism through which to understand the intersection between unresolved pasts and the transmission of trauma post-conflict. As Michael Levan notes, trauma lingers ‘unexorcisably in the places of its perpetration, in the bodies of those affected, in the eyes of the witnesses, and in the politics of memory’. The ghost, according to Avery Gordon ‘is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us’. In this article I argue for three conceptualisations of haunting when past traumas remain unaddressed: the haunting of lost lives, the haunting of landscape, and the haunting presence of the unresolved past. The article focuses on Northern Ireland, a post-conflict jurisdiction described as being haunted by a ‘conflict calendar in which every day is an anniversary’ and extensive fieldwork with victims and survivors of the conflict. The article concludes by arguing that the presence of ghosts and the experience of haunting represent a ‘call to action’ in the quest to deal with a legacy of violent conflict and human rights abuses.

scholarly journals Religion & Transitional Justice

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Colleen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Actors ◽  
Religion And Democracy ◽  
Constitutive Element

Transitional justice refers to the process of dealing with human rights abuses committed during the course of ongoing conflict or repression, where such processes are established as a society aims to move toward a better state, and where a constitutive element of that better state includes democracy. A philosophical theory of transitional justice articulates what the moral criteria or standards are that processes of transitional justice must satisfy to qualify as just responses to past wrongdoing. This essay focuses on the roles of religion in transitional justice. I first consider the multiple and conflicting roles of religion during periods of conflict and repression. I then argue against conceptualizing transitional justice in a theologically grounded manner that emphasizes the importance of forgiveness. Finally, I discuss the prominent role that religious actors often play in processes of transitional justice. I close with the theoretical questions about authority and standing in transitional contexts that warrant further examination, questions that the roles of religious actors highlight. Thinking through the relationship between religion and democracy from the perspective of transitional justice is theoretically fruitful because it sheds more light on additional dimensions to the issue of authority than those scholars of liberal democracy have traditionally taken up.

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