Synchrony is Key to the Success of Transitional Justice Mechanisms
Latin
America has become the undisputed global leader in transitional justice and a
model for efforts around the world. This is due, in part, to its position at
the forefront of the “third wave” of democratization and its relatively long
experience and practice in developing mechanisms to deal with past
authoritarian state violence. Latin America’s leadership in transitional
justice also results from its many innovations. These include restorative
justice processes, or prosecuting perpetrators of atrocities of past authoritarian
regimes. A third area of innovation is the role that Latin America has played
in international transitional justice developments.
Findings from the study on transitional justice may be complicated due
to variation in different cases. For instance, while national trials in
Argentina and elsewhere may have played important roles in protecting human
rights in multi-faceted ways, the same in Poland (Jaruzelski) and in Iraq
(Saddam) bordered of farce. The truth Commission in Sierra Leone may have been
seen as irrelevant to the daily life of the population, while the one in South
Africa may have made a contribution to all race liberal democracy. While
data-based studies are likely to give us good indication of probabilities,
qualitative studies are likely to flesh out the details and improve our understanding
of different situations.
Both retributive justice and restorative justice are two broad
approaches that have been widely and concurrently employed to address
injustices and human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts. The
former emphasizes on the importance of judicial mechanisms such as criminal
trials as a way of seeking justice for the victims and deterring future crimes.
The latter, on the other hand, emphasizes on healing and reconciliation rather
than retribution. The priority in this second mechanism largely shifts from the
perpetrators to the victims since the needs of the victims and affected
communities are given priority. Restorative justice makes use of non-judicial
mechanisms such as truth commissions and attempts to achieve its objectives
through truth-telling, information gathering, official apology and
memorialization.
Unfortunately the two approaches have largely been examined separately or
as being exclusive or even antagonistic to each other as opposed to being complementally.
The non-judicial initiatives concerned with restorative justice often receive less
attention from human rights advocacy groups than their restorative justice
counterparts. Some pundits argue that this might reflect the fact that the
correlation between retributive mechanisms such truth commissions’ work and
their long term objectives are both difficult to measure and often shrouded
with uncertainty.
This
complication extends to the very task of establishing the role of truth
commissions in the process of democratization. The major problem is the limited
powers such commissions receive from governments compounded by other
organizational, procedural and technical challenges. It could be difficult to
establish truth commissions and successfully facilitate their fruitful
operations, but their contribution cannot be under-estimated. This is
especially true since prosecutions can only be a partial response to past human
rights violations in the context of post-conflict societies where the needs of
victims in terms of healing and reparations are equally worth of consideration.
Both experience and studies point at tensions within
and among different mechanisms of transitional justice. This makes the outcome
of such mechanisms both largely uncertain and uneasy to predict. One of the
major setbacks identifiable here, is lack of coordination between different
mechanisms hence the need to synchronise mechanisms and approaches.
Synchrony is Key to the Success of Transitional Justice Mechanisms
Reviewed by Ibrahim Magara
on
February 07, 2017
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