Tracking Down the Missing Financial Link in Transitional Justice

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-92
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Economic Considerations ◽  
Choice Approach

This article argues that lenders providing financial assistance to authoritarian regimes should be held responsible for complicity if they knew or should have known that they would facilitate human rights abuses. Discussing the lenders’ role in a transitional justice context leads to a broadening of legal and institutional tools to channel this responsibility. This article starts by critically assessing the micro criteria traditionally used to understand the causal link between finance and human rights abuses, suggesting that a macro (i.e. holistic, interdisciplinary and casuistic) approach considering structures, processes and dynamics of sovereign financing should be applied when interpreting this link. It also explains how that traditional view is being challenged. A rational choice approach is taken to explain the most salient financial features of large-scale campaigns of gross human rights violations in order to understand the real relevance of funds in contexts of criminal regimes. The legal bases of responsibility for complicity are then discussed, separately presenting the arguments applied to private, multilateral and bilateral lenders. It also outlines how the missing financial link could be integrated into the domain of transitional justice, presenting, elaborating and assessing enforceability of concrete mechanisms to channel financial complicity in order to attain transitional goals. Finally, concluding remarks and challenges on the relationship between financial complicity and transitional justice are presented; and policy and economic considerations are made to better understand the real implications that incorporating the financial dimension into the transitional justice universe could have for a country.

scholarly journals The European Court of Human Rights, Transitional Justice and Historical Abuse in Consolidated Democracies

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-704
Author(s):  
James Gallen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In recent years, both transitional justice and the role of the European Court of Human Rights in dealing with historical abuses have evolved. Transitional justice has begun to address widespread or systemic human rights abuses outside of the contexts of armed conflict and authoritarian regimes. In three key recent judgments, El-Masri v Macedonia, Janowiec v Russia and O’Keeffe v Ireland, the Court has clarified and expanded its approach to addressing historical human rights violations relevant to transitional justice in significant, if inconsistent, ways. To date, there is no exploration of the relationship between transitional justice, historical abuse outside the contexts of armed conflict or authoritarian rule and the European Convention of Human Rights. This article seeks to address that gap by considering the potential opportunities and obstacles for the use of the Convention to address historical abuse in consolidated democracies as a part of transitional justice.

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.

Emotional Legacies, Transitional Justice and Alethic Truth

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-165
Author(s):  
Janine Natalya Clark
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Therapeutic Jurisprudence ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
Emotional Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Missed Opportunity

Abstract Transitional justice processes seek to address the legacy of past human rights abuses. This article focuses on the emotional dimensions of legacy. It argues that war crimes and human rights abuses leave important emotional legacies that have not received sufficient attention within transitional justice theory or practice, and underscores that any process of ‘dealing with the past’ is necessarily incomplete if powerful emotions connected to that past are overlooked. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork in the Bosnian village of Ahmići, the article aims to demonstrate that the neglect of emotional legacies — which it links to the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence — represents a missed opportunity to explore how the meta emotions that people share constitute potential new bases for building reconciliation in post-conflict societies such as Bosnia-Herzegovina. Reflecting more broadly on the relationship between truth and reconciliation, it emphasizes the utility of alethic truth as a concept that accommodates and draws attention to common emotions — and thus points to unexplored dimensions of the relationship between truth and reconciliation.

A Lockean Approach to Transitional Justice

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Stacey
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Hard Case ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Law Of Nature

Locke can speak interestingly to the problem of transitional justice, that is, how to deal withthose who committed human rights abuses under authoritarian regimes once those regimes democratize. The essay focuses mainly on the “hard case” of transitional justice, in which former members of an authoritarian regime retain significant capacity for violence, and so the ability to threaten the new polity if attempts are made to punish them. Locke's law of nature suggests that human rights abusers should be punished, although not at the expense of social stability.But it also grounds the apparently un-Lockean claims, consistent with some of Locke's occasional writings, that abusersquaeschewers of reason may be treated as beasts that do not enjoy natural rights, and that little account need be taken of the victims of such abusers. Using Locke's thought in this way both illuminates it and clarifies what is at stake in the debate about transitional justice.

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.

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.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Aiden Warren ◽  
Damian Grenfell
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
State Security ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
External Powers ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Dominate Discourse

The need to fundamentally rethink interventions is before us. Driven by a combination of pressing humanitarian need as well as conceptual and theoretical dilemmas that limit the value of analysis, it is evident we are seemingly at the crossroads. The crises in Syria and Iraq – the human rights abuses, the destruction of cities and the attenuating flows of refugees into Europe – have only been enough to garner specific military action from external powers in ways closely aligned to national interests. There is the sense that despite being decades on from the end of the Cold War and notwithstanding the varying kinds of interventions in the name of humanitarian ends that have taken place, we have come full circle. For all their challenges and faults, at the end of the twentieth century Kosovo and Timor-Leste suggested that there was enough benefit gained by interventions that they had a future in global politics. The post-9/11 military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, however, come to dominate discourse as wars fought overwhelmingly for state security rather than humanitarian ends (even though the latter are used instrumentally as a justification at times). Moreover, as events in Syria have unfolded, it has become even harder to discern who would be assisted, and to what end, by a large-scale intervention like those that occurred across the 1990s. The widening of Syria’s civil war into a regional one, and the toll on civilians (approximately 260,000 at time of publication), reflects elements that are described in ‘new wars’ analysis, and yet are overlain with shifting forms of globalised warfare, intersections with terrorism, while reaffirming what appears to be more classical superpower rivalries (though now it is between different versions of empire and capitalism). It is such a riven mess that it is quite possible that the only ‘end game’ will come in the form of general annihilation....

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