scholarly journals Introduction

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Briony Jones ◽  
Thomas Brudholm
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Critical Turn ◽  
Past Wrongs ◽  
The Way

Transitional justice, as a process and set of mechanisms designed to address human rights violations of the past, is a project of transformation. Designed to deal with legacies of past wrongs, transitional justice ideally aims to address their root causes, to adjudicate social and institutional responsibilities, to transform the institutional contexts and power relations that enabled human rights violations to take place, to restore, repair, or facilitate new relationships and to promote national unity and reconciliation. Now an established policy response to the end of civil war, authoritarian regimes or occupation, transitional justice has been the focus of scholarly attention for long enough to have warranted a critical turn, both in terms of the way transitional justice is theorized (Corradetti, Eisikovits, and Rotondi 2015; Hirsch 2012) and the way in which it is implemented and experienced in practice. Examples of such critiques include accusations of imposition of western norms that are not culturally meaningful in some contexts, of the dominance of legal approaches to justice at the expense of the restorative and symbolic, of its instrumentalization by the powerful for the consolidation of authority or privilege, and of limited evidence that it actually has a positive impact on justice and peace (see, e.g., Iliff 2012; Leebaw 2008; Pouligny 2005).

scholarly journals Reconciliation: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s contribution to dealing with the past, reconciling and building the nation

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Barry
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Expediency ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

International experience has shown that addressing past human rights violations is a necessary step in the process of reconciliation and nation building. How was post-apartheid, democratic South Africa to deal with its past human rights violations? Would it go the way of retribution in order to settle the scores of the past? Would it go the way of blanket amnesty in the name of political expediency and ignore the fate of its victims?   The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation, Act 34 of 1995, which established the TRC envisaged that national unity and reconciliation could be promoted by determining the extent, and the fate and whereabouts of the victims, of such human rights violations; giving opportunity for story-telling; recommending reparations and measures to prevent future violations; and by providing a full report. In order to do so the Commission had the power to grant amnesty to those making such disclosures.  This article, while not uncritical of the Commission, is generally positive about its contribution both in attempting to deal with the past, and in building a democratic, human rights and restorative justice culture based on the rule of law. It examines the definitions of reconciliation that emerged during the Commission in the light of a Christian definition where reconciliation is seen to be between God, others and self, and involves integration with the human community. This integration involves taking responsibility for the past, confession and repentance, forgiving and being forgiven, making restitution where possible, ongoing transformation in the present and hope for the future.

Transition, ‘Never Again’ and ‘Moving On’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hearty
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Irish Republicanism ◽  
Difficult Issue ◽  
Subsequent Replacement

Viewing Irish republican policing memory primarily through a transitional justice lens, this chapter critically examines how Irish republicans, as a principal party to the conflict, approach the difficult issue of ‘dealing with the past’ as both collective victims and perpetrators of human rights violations during the conflict. It will interrogate the range of divergent views within modern Irish republicanism on issues such as victimhood, truth recovery, ‘moving on’ and ‘dealing with the past’. In particular, it looks at how the memory of human rights violations framed the wider policing debate and led to a master narrative of ‘never again’ whereby the value of ‘remembering’ past abuses lay in helping to prevent future repetition. This is placed against a more general backdrop of the stop-start ‘dealing with the past’ process in the North of Ireland that has included the establishment, operation and subsequent replacement of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), the passage of the Civil Service (Special Advisers) Act (Northern Ireland), and proposals like the Haass/O’Sullivan document and the Stormont House Agreement.

Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Politics of memory and majoritarian conservatism

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 691-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Onur Bakiner
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Shared Memory ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
State Control ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Past Wrongs

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I callmajoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.

Democratizing Societies Confront Their Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Spillover Effect ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Past

This chapter examines various processes of democratization and confrontation within the legacies of the last wave of repressive authoritarianism in the Americas. Undergoing periods of civil unrest, repression, and human rights violations, these societies faced a tortuous process of coming to terms with that experience, enforcing policies of transitional justice without an easy way of closing the book on the past. This chapter suggests a comparative look at various policy paths and their consequences, highlighting a transnational spillover effect as countries looked upon one another and drew inferences for calibrating and advancing their own processes of overcoming the scars of authoritarian repression. The analysis identifies the constellation of national and transnational factors that eventually opened institutional ground for belated truth telling and accountability for historical wrongs.

scholarly journals Is the Responsibility to Protect an Accepted Norm of International Law in the post-Libya Era?

2018 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Jeremy Sarkin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
One Dimensional

This article explores the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the post-Libya era to determinewhether it is now an accepted norm of international law. It examines what RtoP means intoday`s world and whether the norm now means that steps will be taken against states thatare committing serious human rights violations. The building blocks of RtoP are examined tosee how to make the doctrine more relevant and more applicable. It is contended that theresponsibility to react should be viewed through a much wider lens and that it needs to bemore widely interpreted to allow it to gain greater support. It is argued that there is a need tofocus far more on the responsibility to rebuild and that it ought to focus on the transitionallegal architecture as well as transitional justice. It is contended that these processes ought notto be one-dimensional, but ought to have a variety of constituent parts. It is further arguedthat the international and donor community ought to be far more engaged and far moredirective in these projects.

Contingency in International Law

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
International Law ◽  
Present State ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Way

This volume asks a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: Could international law have been otherwise? In other words, what were the past possibilities, if any, for a different law? The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, including in the present volume, by the refusal to accept the present state of affairs and by the hope that recovering possibilities of the past will facilitate a different future. The volume situates the search for contingency theoretically and within many fields of international law, such as human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, and foreign investment and trade. Today there is hardly a serious account that would consider the path of international law to be necessary and that would deny the possibility of a different law altogether. At the same time, however, behind every possibility of the past stands a reason – or reasons – why the law developed as it did. Those who embark in search of contingency soon encounter tensions when they want to recover past possibilities without downplaying patterns of determination and domination. Nevertheless, while warring critical sensibilities may point in different directions, only a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did makes it possible to argue about how they could plausibly have turned out differently.

Of Old Men, Country Clubs, and Atrocities: The Visualities and Externalities of Detaining Elderly Human Rights Violators in Chile

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Caroline Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Negative Externality ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Penal Reform ◽  
Country Club ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Old Men ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article explores a pair of powerful but competing symbols in the Chilean human transitional justice process: ‘pobres viejitos’ (poor little old men) and country club prisons. The symbol of the ‘pobres viejitos’ is used very effectively by conservative elements of Chilean society to argue the futility or even inhumanity of punishing perpetrators of human right violations so long after the commission of their crimes. In turn, to victims and more liberal segments of society, the country club or ‘five star’ prison for human rights violators stands as a symbol of impunity and the failure of the Chilean state to do justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. This article examines the power of these symbols in undermining support for transitional justice efforts, as well as the externalities of the debate. The fate of the ‘pobres viejitos’ and whether to release the from even their relatively comfortable places of confinement has bled into debates on penal reform for other elderly prisoners. This mostly negative externality suggests the need for international and regional courts (or countries not in the throes of transitional justice processes, particularly delayed ones) to lead the way on the articulation of human rights norms related to the trial and punishment of elderly prisoners.

The Experience of Volunteers and Frontline Workers in Marginalized Communities Across Southeast Asia

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Chuah Siew Mooi ◽  
Ann Nicole Nunis
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stigma And Discrimination ◽  
Hiv Aids

This chapter focuses on the experience of volunteers and frontline workers who serve in marginalized communities across Southeast Asia. More frontline workers and volunteers are taking the initiative to support marginalized communities in the region. With the rise of human rights violations towards marginalized communities in the past decade, frontline workers and volunteers face unique experiences in working with these communities, ranging from stigma and discrimination to unaddressed levels of burnout. Based on the authors' experiences working with these communities and the summary of the interviews with fellow frontline workers, the experience of working with marginalized communities, particularly those affected by HIV/AIDS and refugees, are elaborated in this chapter. Current challenges as well as recommendations are highlighted to ensure that the frontline workers and volunteers are supported throughout their vital work towards society.

22. Transitional Justice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna R. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Retributive Justice ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
The Social

This chapter examines the link between transitional justice and human rights. Atrocities such as genocide, disappearances, torture, civil conflict, and other gross violations of human rights leave states with a puzzling and often difficult question: what to do with the perpetrators of such acts of violence. Transitional justice takes into account the social implications of such conflicts. Its emphasis is on how to rebuild societies in the period after human rights violations, as well as with how such societies, and individuals within those societies, should be held to account for their actions. The chapter considers three paradigms of transitional justice, namely: retributive justice, restorative justice, and reparative justice. It also discusses the proliferation of the number of mechanisms of transitional justice at work and concludes with a case study of transitional justice in Uganda.

Witnessing the Ruins of Apartheid

Matatu ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Marie Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Prison Staff ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Former Inmates

AbstractConstitution Hill, a unique and hybrid memorial site in the centre of Johannesburg, commemorates the violence of apartheid in the city’s infamous prison complex. Based on a series of workshops with former inmates and prison staff, the permanent exhibitions emphasize the importance of personal objects and testimonials for understanding the human rights violations of the past and their significance for the present and the future. In response to Yvonne Owuor’s appeal to remember the vulnerability of those human bodies who no one “[has] bothered to mention, to mourn”, my article attempts to map a new path towards responsible forms of spectatorship as we walk through the former Women’s Jail and listen to the witness accounts of Deborah Matshoba and Nolundi Ntamo.

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