New Developments in Transitional Justice

Abstract

The question of how the human rights violations of previous regimes and past periods of conflict ought to be addressed is one of the most pressing concerns facing governments and policy makers today. New democracies and states in the fragile post-conflict peace-settlement phase are confronted by the need to make crucial decisions about whether to hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable for their actions and, if so, the mechanisms they ought to employ to best achieve that end. Since the 1980s, post-transitional states have increasingly opted in favour of accountability for human rights violations and have used a wide range of measures from prosecutions and punishment to truth-telling, lustration of police and security forces, reparations, and judicial reforms, to reconciliation processes, apologies, forgiveness ceremonies, exhumations and reburials, memorialisation projects, traditional and indigenous justice practices, and other guarantees of non-repetition. As in increasing numbers of states and societies are engaging transitional justice mechanisms, so too is the nature of transitional justice and its application in transitional contexts changing. This panel examines new developments in the study and practice of transitional justice and considers how scholars of transitional justice can usefully evaluate the successes and failure of these developments. In doing so, it examines not only the theoretical question of how to evaluate success but considers three different contexts in which rapid developments are taking place: i) in the practice and processes of hybrid human rights tribunals (focusing on the case of Cambodia); ii) in the institution and administration of truth and reconciliation commissions (focusing on the case of the Solomon Islands); and iii) in the extension of transitional justice practices to address separatist violence (focusing on the case of India).

Title	Details
Evaluating the Success of Transitional Justice	View Paper Details
The Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report: Forgiving the Perpetrators, Forgetting the Victims?	View Paper Details
Transitional Justice in Cambodia: The Coincidence of Power and Principle	View Paper Details
Transitional Justice in India and the Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984	View Paper Details