The Rights of the Families of Missing Persons: Going Beyond International Humanitarian Law

The main aim of the article is to test how states implement international humanitarian law (IHL) with regard to the families of missing persons. The article shows relevant IHL shortcomings and compares them with rules applicable in cases of enforced disappearance. The national legislation collected in the section titled ‘The Missing and Their Families’ of the National Implementation Database of the International Committee of the Red Cross is then examined. The analysis addresses three core questions that are particularly relevant for families of missing persons: (1) Who is considered a missing person under each law? Approaching this question allows the testing of whether states follow the understanding of ‘missing persons’ under IHL treaty law. The second and third questions address two issues that are crucial for families of missing persons that are not addressed in IHL: (2) How is the legal status of the missing person regulated? (3) Are family members provided with measures of reparation and/or assistance? This approach reveals that states rarely apply the IHL understanding of ‘missing persons’ and predominantly exceed IHL by addressing some of the identified shortcomings. It further shows that states provide families of missing persons either with reparation measures – in cases of human rights violations – or, less often, with measures of assistance in post-conflict situations.

Memory Laws as a Misuse of Legislation

Memory laws are often accused of enforcing an inaccurate, manipulative or populist view of history. Some are also said to violate fundamental rights, in particular the right to free speech. These accusations are not entirely unjustified. Yet, a discussion of memory legislation that concentrates on these faults might be missing its mark. The main problem with memory legislation is not necessarily with the merits of any particular law. Rather, the determination of historical facts is not the kind of matter that should be entrusted to the legislator in the first place. The role of legislation is to make social cooperation possible despite substantial disagreement, but only when such social cooperation is indeed required. Disputes about historical facts, I argue, are not a coordination problem that requires a legislative solution. Still less can they justify legal coercion.

Transformation – Overcoming the Limits of Liberal Peace and Transitional Justice in Deeply Divided Societies: Reconciliation in Liberal Peace Theory

This article explores the tension between the theoretical conceptualisations of liberal peace, transitional justice and reconciliation by focusing on power sharing as a liberal peace institution-building mechanism. Power sharing is based on the premise that identities in conflict in deeply divided societies are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The article outlines the limitations of liberal peace by demonstrating how the implementation of power-sharing arrangements creates a political reality in which conflict patterns are further entrenched, thus hindering the prospects of conflict transformation. In order to address the limitations of liberal peace, the article draws on models of transformative justice to highlight the growing need for a new conceptualisation of reconciliation as a political and transformative concept, in which both justice and reconciliation are recognised as intrinsic goals for post-conflict societies. Thus, the re-establishment of political structures and institutional reforms is envisaged not only as a tool to promote political stability, but as a means of facilitating transformation in conflict patterns in the political and social spheres.

Israeli Pre-Transitional Justice and the Nakba Law

Pre-transitional justice activities that expose past injustices during entrenched conflicts can incite strong reactions among actors who feel threatened by or dislike such activities, and who thus attempt to silence controversial truths. This article illuminates how attempts to silence controversial truths, in parallel with shutting down debate, can also have the unintended outcome of enlarging public discourse on previously marginalised issues. Thus, paradoxically, efforts to curb freedom of expression sometimes result instead in an expanded public capacity to debate previously silenced truths about the conflict. We conduct a case study of reactions to pre-transitional justice in Israeli society focusing on the so-called Nakba Law, enacted in 2011. Through interviews with members of the non-governmental organisation Zochrot, politicians, teachers and media persons, we first show the relationship between pre-transitional justice and enacting the Nakba Law. We then demonstrate that while the Nakba Law indeed aimed to hamper freedom of expression, it also enabled increased public knowledge about the meaning of Nakba. Our theoretical proposition regarding this paradox, in this case activated by instigating new memory laws, is highly relevant to other conflicts-in-resolution that experience pre-transitional justice processes.

Truth and Closure in Cyprus: An Assessment of the Committee on Missing Persons

There are two key limitations to the literature that explores the relationship between truth and closure in post-violence societies. The first is that this relationship has been assessed mostly as part of a larger debate focusing on the links between the truth and the seemingly related concept of reconciliation. The second is that to the extent that the literature has addressed the connections between truth and closure as such, it has focused almost exclusively on the operations and effects of courts and truth commissions. The article addresses both limitations by examining the relationship between truth and closure through the prism of a different institution, the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus. Relying on 34 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, including relatives of missing persons on the island, it argues that the Committee's delivery of the truth has promoted closure in three distinct ways. At the same time it acknowledges that the type of truth and the way in which it is delivered can have detrimental consequences for the promotion of closure. A short video summarising the findings of this article is available here.

International Refugee Regime: An Alternative Form of Protection for Human Rights Defenders?

Human rights defenders (HRDs) are subjected to serious human rights violations through legal and extralegal actions. Notably, most of the abuses against them remain unpunished, perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence against them. There is room for doubt that international human rights law has failed to provide efficient protection for HRDs, and this article considers the international refugee regime as an alternative system of protection. In this sense the article first discusses the intersection between the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘human rights defender’ to establish that defenders fall within the protection of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Following an inductive reasoning, the article considers the most well-trodden defects of the refugee regime and the reluctance of HRDs to adopt refugee status; it concludes that this alternative may not be suitable for defenders. Besides a doctrinal approach, the article employs a socio-legal approach, which is enhanced by interviews with HRDs.