Due to the “globalization” of Transitional Justice, its practices have become normalized while the field has grown to encompass a vast array of legal measures and diverse actors (Teitel and Rangelov, 2011). In the former Yugoslavia, an international criminal tribunal (ICTY), various international organizations (e.g. UNDP, OSCE), and countless local initiatives have all engaged in the complex process of dealing with the legacies of the systematic violations committed during the conflicts of the ‘90s. By studying them, we can formulate some conjectures about the common factors that, by underlying all these experiences, allow us to conceive of a “global” dimension of transitional justice. For instance, although their focuses are expressly different, they resort to similar rules and discourses, those of international human rights law, which thereby seems to provide a common framework for debating the contentious truths and accountabilities of the past, as theorized by Marc Osiel (2000). In particular, the experience of the recent “Coalition for Recom”—constituted in 2006 by circa 1000 NGOs, from all of the former Yugoslav republics, to advocate for the formation of a fact-finding Commission on the Yugoslav wars—shows how bottom-up approaches and regional dimension can successfully cohabit with top-down “global” elements. In fact, in the definition of its goals, the Coalition borrows widely from the language and the rules of international law, expressly relies on the conclusions of the ICTY, and continues to receive expert advice from INGOs like the “International Center for Transitional Justice” (ICTJ). Through the analysis of the ongoing experience of the “Coalition for Recom”, this paper will attempt some reflections on the interplay between local and international transitional justice actors, and on the extent to which international human rights discourse can empower local claims of truth and justice, thereby forging a lingua franca of a “global” transitional justice.
