Tag: Transitional Justice

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Humanitarian Issues

Will Colombians Embrace Their New Peace Deal?

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Courtesy antefixus21/flickr

This article was originally published by the IPI’s Global Observatory on 26 August 2016.

After 52 years of armed conflict, the Colombian government and FARC rebels announced a final agreement aimed at ending one of the world’s longest-lasting insurgencies. In talks that began in Havana in 2012, the two sides have reached understandings on peacebuilding measures that include transitional justice, accounting for the “disappeared,” and a plan for demobilization of the rebels’ estimated 7,000 fighters. The historic agreement opens the way for peace after an internal conflict that, in a nation of 50 million, has left 220,000 dead, 7.65 million recorded victims, and more than 6 million people displaced from their homes.

The accord marks the beginning of the end of the FARC as an armed group and of Colombia’s internal armed conflict. This is a tremendous achievement by not only the two negotiating teams and the international community that supported the talks, but also by Colombian civil society, which for decades pressed for a political solution.

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Categories
Humanitarian Issues

Justice and Accountability for War Related Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka

 

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Courtesy Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr

This article was originally published by openDemocracy on 15 August 2016.

As the testimonies of survivors of sexual violence in Sri Lanka’s long war enter the public domain and the government designs transitional justice mechanisms, is an end to impunity in sight?

The Sri Lankan government is currently designing transitional justice mechanisms to address human rights abuses connected to the three decade long war which ended in May 2009. But a key question is whether victims of sexual violence and rape committed in the context of the war will come forward and use these mechanisms?

The silence around sexual violence has long posed a challenge to determining its nature, scale and magnitude in the context of Sri Lanka’s long war. On the one hand, this is due to the pervasive culture of shame, which deters women from speaking out. Twenty-five years ago, in Broken Palmyrah Rajini Thiranagama noted that the “loss of virginity in a young girl, even if against her will, meant that she could not aspire to marriage in our society and, if already married, there is a good chance that she will be abandoned”.

The view of rape victims as “spoilt goods” has always been one of the most significant causes of under-reporting. Survivors and their families are however silenced not only by the shame of rape, but also by fear. Fear of reprisal by perpetrators or of further violence from the very institutions meant to protect them. That too remains unchanged.

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Transitional Justice as Politics

Justice with a swagger
Justice? Photo: quinn.anya/flickr.

It is widely accepted that transitional justice can and should be separated from politics. How societies and states achieve justice in the wake of mass atrocities, so it goes, is a pursuit that must be divorced from political calculations. Indeed, in the eyes of many, politics is poison to any attempt at achieving accountability and combating impunity. Justice must be above and beyond politics.

As I have written previously, the field of transitional justice suffers from a diversity of problems. It is an ever-growing conceptual minefield that has accepted so much under its mandate that it risks losing its meaning. Increasingly, transitional justice no longer refers strictly to the approaches societies take to account for the past in the wake of conflict, dictatorship or a period of mass atrocity. Instead, a broad array of issues from Security Sector Reform, forced migration, Demobilization and Reintegration Reform, amongst others, are now considered under the transitional justice umbrella.

Another problem within the field and, especially, the practice of transitional justice has been a certain denial of politics. The strength of transitional justice is that it is political and, as such, represents the possibility of building societies and peace on the basis of a good politics.

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The Power and Politics of Transitional Justice

Justice statue, located at the US Courthouse in Lafayette. Photo: mjecker/flickr

One of the overarching ideas this blog explores is the emerging trend of appealing to international criminal justice in (and in the wake of) conflict situations. The fact that “we no longer consider whether to pursue justice, but how and when” is part of the proliferation of the practice and perhaps more importantly the idea of transitional justice. The speed of TJ’s expansion is striking. It cycled through its celebratory phase, was consolidated as a field of knowledge and practice, and developed a body of critical literature within a decade of its formation as a concept. The tensions that exist within the “field” are also striking; transitional justice often seeks to balance conflicting ideas such as peace and justice, the international and the local, retribution and restoration, law and politics. As a field of knowledge it draws upon competing and conflicting disciplines and as a field of practice it attempts to apply unified narratives to a range of local experiences.

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