Classifying Countries within the Transitional Justice Typology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Employment Change ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
File Access ◽  
Independent Variable ◽  
Public Disclosures

Chapter 2 explores each of the country cases in this project, namely the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Albania. The chapter provides historical details of the transitional justice reforms in all twelve countries from 1989–2013, covering lustration, file access, public disclosures, and truth commissions. This material is then used to place each country case within the typology developed in Chapter 1, according to whether the measures were expansive and included compulsory employment change, limited and included largely voluntary employment change, informal and largely symbolic, or actively rejected. The chapter provides variable conceptualization and operationalization specifics to be used in the subsequent statistical analyses, including three different lustration variables, a truth commission variable, and timing of reform variables. It provides qualitative, comparative historical details to justify the classification of countries according to the primary independent variable, namely lustration and public disclosure programs.

Trust and Transitional Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Interpersonal Trust ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Trust In Government ◽  
Change Characteristic ◽  
Communist Countries

Chapter 1 provides a literature review upon which to build the theoretical scaffolding of this book and explicates the development of the lustration typology. The chapter reviews the trust literature, highlighting differences in the origins and effects of trust in public institutions, trust in government, interpersonal trust, and trust in social institutions. Chapter 1 also reviews the literature on lustration and transitional justice, highlighting the design and use of measures in the post-communist region. From this literature, Chapter 1 develops a transitional justice typology consisting of four different categories of lustration and public disclosure programs based on the scope and implementation of programs and the degree of bureaucratic and symbolic change characteristic of the different programs. This typology is then used to categorize post-communist countries in Chapter 2.

Conclusion: Evaluating Post-Communist Transitional Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Public Disclosures ◽  
Communist Countries

Unlike the blanket criticisms or accolades transitional justice measures receive in the literature, we are confronted with the reality of divergent and contingent relationships between transitional justice measures like lustration, public disclosures, and truth commissions and political and social trust-building goals. These findings force us to reconsider policy recommendations associated with transitional justice programs both because of possibly contrary outcomes, and due to previously unconsidered temporal conditions. With respect to comparative democratization, this study demonstrated a potentially important democracy promotion effect from transitional justice measures meriting continued exploration. This retrospective of nearly twenty-five years of transitional justice in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union contributes to the growing body of knowledge on regional regime change, with special attention to how issues of complicity, trust building, and nostalgia constitute unique challenges faced by former communist countries.

Lustration, Public Disclosures, and Social Trust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Social Trust ◽  
Interpersonal Trust ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
File Access ◽  
Public Disclosures ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines the conditions under which lustration and truth commissions affected social trust, separately considering trust in social institutions and interpersonal trust. This chapter shows that measures to improve social trust might have unintended, negative consequences. More compulsory lustration programs were associated with less trust in unions and the church at both the individual and aggregate levels. There is some evidence to support the contentions of critics that lustration might adversely affect social institutions via blowback from truth telling and public disclosures about previous regime complicity. With respect to interpersonal trust, while late file access procedures and personal disclosures could affect interpersonal trust in the future, the lustration of public office holders has not undermined interpersonal trust as feared. The findings from this chapter reconfirmed the theoretical argument specified in Chapter 1 regarding the expected differential impact of lustration measures on particularized and generalized social trust.

Transitional Justice and Temporal Parameters: Built-In Expiration Dates?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M Horne
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Fixed Time ◽  
Optimal Timing ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
European Court ◽  
Long Duration ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Public Disclosures ◽  
Venice Commission

Abstract Temporal assumptions associated with personnel reforms, such as lustration and public disclosure programs, both prescribe the optimal timing for the onset of measures and proscribe a long duration for such measures. In the context of the post-communist transitions, these assumptions suggested that lustration and public disclosures should be enacted as soon as possible after a regime transition, with the legitimacy, motives, and legal appropriateness of delayed measures being questioned. In terms of duration, personnel reforms should have fixed time limits, often suggested as no more than a decade. This article critically explores the evolution of these temporal assumptions through an examination of the legal rulings, intergovernmental policies, and recommendations of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Venice Commission. The article illustrates the tension between the continued use of the measures by some post-communist states and international rulings signalling their expiration.

Building Trust in Public Institutions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Trust ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Building Effects

This chapter examines the conditions under which lustration and truth commissions affected trust in targeted public institutions, such as the judiciary, the parliament, the police, and political parties, or composites of institutions, such as oversight institutions or elected institutions. I find strong and consistent relationships between lustration and political trust, except for the most highly politicized public institutions. More extensive and compulsory programs were associated with the largest trust-building effects. Truth commissions were not associated with political trust-building. This chapter also demonstrates that delayed reforms were more effective than reforms initiated right after the transition for most of the institutions, except for highly politicized institutions. This runs contrary to assumptions about the necessity of starting reforms immediately after the transition or not at all. The chapter presents the paired cases of Bulgaria and Romania and illustrates the possibilities for public disclosure programs to effect lustration-like reforms.

Off-line classification of Polish vowel spectra using artificial neural networks

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Wiktor Jassem ◽  
Waldemar Grygiel
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Numerical Data ◽  
Word List ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Data Matrix ◽  
Probabilistic Neural Networks ◽  
Independent Variable ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Vowel Phoneme

The mid-frequencies and bandwidths of formants 1–5 were measured at targets, at plus 0.01 s and at minus 0.01 s off the targets of vowels in a 100-word list read by five male and five female speakers, for a total of 3390 10-variable spectrum specifications. Each of the six Polish vowel phonemes was represented approximately the same number of times. The 3390* 10 original-data matrix was processed by probabilistic neural networks to produce a classification of the spectra with respect to (a) vowel phoneme, (b) identity of the speaker, and (c) speaker gender. For (a) and (b), networks with added input information from another independent variable were also used, as well as matrices of the numerical data appropriately normalized. Mean scores for classification with respect to phonemes in a multi-speaker design in the testing sets were around 95%, and mean speaker-dependent scores for the phonemes varied between 86% and 100%, with two speakers scoring 100% correct. The individual voices were identified between 95% and 96% of the time, and classifications of the spectra for speaker gender were practically 100% correct.

Transitional Justice and Changing Memories of the Past in Central Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-44
Author(s):  
Roman David
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Impact

Memories of wrongdoings are often viewed as an obstacle to reconciliation in divided societies. Is it due to the past or the present politics of the past? To examine the dilemma of essentialism versus presentism, this article investigates the impact of transitional justice on memories of wrongdoing. It theorizes that using different transitional justice strategies to deal with the same wrongdoing shapes memories in different ways. The theory is tested via vignette-based surveys in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which adopted distinct lustration laws. The results show that wrongdoing is viewed through lustration laws, reflecting present power constellations, not history.

Many Doors to International Criminal Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
John Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Complex Sequences

Responsibilities to protect and prevent elite crimes are best energized by enforcement that walks through many doors. Effective deterrence is rarely delivered by the International Criminal Court. Yet deterrence is possible when it patiently cumulates through many doors. Likewise truth, justice, and reconciliation can achieve little through one door and much through many. Opening more doors to the complexly cross-cutting character of survivor guilt with mass atrocities can better open possibilities for future prevention and reconciliation than simply doors to courtrooms that find a criminal on one side of complex sequences of atrocity. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials opened quickly after World War II. They did not prove to hold keys to truth and reconciliation for Germany until the Eichmann trial finished in Jerusalem in 1962. Why? Still today, non-confession by the U.S. to Hiroshima/Nagasaki as war crimes has meant truncated Japanese reconciliation. Different kinds of doors are needed with crimes like the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombing, the rape of Nanjing and the “comfort women” issue. These have included citizens tribunals, truth commissions, and indigenous justice in cases like Bougainville that rejected the truth commission model. When we reflect upon door diversity, transitional justice turns out not to be very focused on justice or international criminal law, and not to be at all transitional, but rather a maze of doors to justice of diverse kinds that open or close across the longue durée (as developed in the work of Susanne Karstedt).1

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