"The Global Impact and Legacy of Truth Commissions' emerges at a time when there is a confluence of two trends. The first is a growing critique of truth commissions as being unresponsive to the socio-economic needs of transitional societies as part of growing criticism of transitional justice as a whole. The second is the increasing use, salience, professionalism and ambition of truth commissions. Thus, the book is published at a time when truth commissions are being both doubted and reified like never before. In this context, the book's purpose is to understand the impact and legacy of these institutions over the past fifty years. Bringing together many prominent voices on the topic, this book investigates what kind of impact and legacy (possibly 100) truth commissions have had on the societies in which they have taken place, and for future truth commissions the world over"--
Onur Bakiner evaluates the success of truth commissions in promoting political, judicial, and social change. He argues that even when commissions produce modest change as a result of political constraints, they open new avenues for human rights activism and transform public discourses on memory, truth, justice, and reconciliation.
Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars, practitioners, and human-rights activists, this groundbreaking volume provides the first systematic analysis of the 2012–2014 Brazilian National Truth Commission. While attentive to the inquiry’s local and national dimensions, it offers an illuminating transnational perspective that considers the Commission’s Latin American regional context and relates it to global efforts for human rights accountability, contributing to a more general and critical reassessment of truth commissions from a variety of viewpoints.
In 1990, after the end of the Pinochet regime, the newly-elected democratic government of Chile established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate and report on some of the worst human rights violations committed under the seventeen-year military dictatorship. The Chilean TRC was one of the first truth commissions established in the world. This book examines whether and how the work of the Chilean TRC contributed to the transition to democracy in Chile and to subsequent developments in accountability and transformation in that country. The book takes a long term view on the Chilean TRC asking to what extent and how the truth commission contributed to the development of the transitional justice measures that ensued, and how the relationship with those subsequent developments was established over time.It argues that, contrary to the views and expectations of those who considered that the Chilean TRC was of limited success, that the Chilean TRC has, in fact, over the longer term, played a key role as an enabler of justice and a means by which ethical and institutional transformation has occurred within Chile. With the benefit of this historical perspective, the book concludes that the impact of truth commissions in general needs to be carefully reviewed in light of the Chilean experience. This book will be of great interest and use to students and scholars of conflict resolution, criminal international law, and comparative legal systems in Latin America.
This book introduces readers to the major human rights institutions, courts, and tribunals and critically assesses their legacy as well as the promise they hold for realizing human rights globally, and the challenges they face in doing so. It traces the rationale of setting up international institutions, courts, and tribunals with the aim of ensuring respect for international human rights law and presents their historic development, and critically analyzes their contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights. At the same time, it asks which promises old and new (and envisaged) human rights institutions hold for safeguarding human rights in light of continuing violations and recent global trends in human rights and politics. The first section presents institutions created within the framework of the United Nations. The second part of the volume assesses how international criminal tribunals have reframed human rights violations as individual criminal acts. The third part of the volume is devoted to established and emerging regional human rights bodies and courts around the world.
The end of the Cold War has changed the shape of organized violence in the world and the ways in which governments and others try to set its limits. Even the concept of international conflict is broadening to include ethnic conflicts and other kinds of violence within national borders that may affect international peace and security. What is not yet clear is whether or how these changes alter the way actors on the world scene should deal with conflict: Do the old methods still work? Are there new tools that could work better? How do old and new methods relate to each other? International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War critically examines evidence on the effectiveness of a dozen approaches to managing or resolving conflict in the world to develop insights for conflict resolution practitioners. It considers recent applications of familiar conflict management strategies, such as the use of threats of force, economic sanctions, and negotiation. It presents the first systematic assessments of the usefulness of some less familiar approaches to conflict resolution, including truth commissions, "engineered" electoral systems, autonomy arrangements, and regional organizations. It also opens up analysis of emerging issues, such as the dilemmas facing humanitarian organizations in complex emergencies. This book offers numerous practical insights and raises key questions for research on conflict resolution in a transforming world system.
This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens. Even though the historical experience of residential schools constituted an act of cultural genocide by Canadian government authorities, the United Nation's declaration of the rights of aboriginal peoples and the specific recommendations of the Commission offer a path to move from apology for these events to true reconciliation that can be embraced by all Canadians.
The Era of Transitional Justice explores a broad set of issues raised by political transition and transitional justice through the prism of the South African TRC. South Africa constitutes a powerful case study of the enduring structural legacies of a troubled past, and of both the potential and limitations of transitional justice and human rights as agents of transformation in the contemporary era. South Africa‘s story has wider relevance because it helped to launch constitutional human rights and transitional justice as global discourses; as such, its own legacy is to some extent writ large in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts across the world. Based on a decade of research, and in an analysis that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, Paul Gready maintains that transitional justice needs to do more to address structural violence and in particular poverty, inequality and social and criminal violence as these have emerged as stubborn legacies from an oppressive or war-torn past in many parts of the world. Organised around four central themes new keyword conceptualisation (truth, justice, reconciliation); re-imagining human rights; engaging with the past and present; remaking the public sphere it is an argument that will be of considerable relevance to those interested in the law and politics of transitional societies.
This book employs a transitional justice lens to address the ‘disappearances’ that occurred during the Northern Ireland conflict – or ‘Troubles’ – and the post-conflict response to these ‘disappearances.’ Despite an extensive literature around ‘dealing with the past’ in Northern Ireland, as well as a substantial body of scholarship on ‘disappearances’ in other national contexts, there has been little scholarly scrutiny of ‘disappearances’ in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Although the Good Friday Agreement brought relative peace to Northern Ireland, no provision was made for the establishment of some form of overarching truth and reconciliation commission aimed at comprehensively addressing the legacy of violence. Nevertheless, a mechanism to recover the remains of the ‘disappeared’ – the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) – was established, and has in fact proven to be quite effective. As a result, the reactions of key constituencies to the ‘disappearances’ can be used as a prism through which to comprehensively explore issues of relevance to transitional justice scholars and practitioners. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, and based on extensive empirical research, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of the responses of these constituencies to the practice of ‘disappearing.’ It engages with transitional justice themes including silence, memory, truth, acknowledgement, and apology. Key issues examined include the mobilisation efforts of families of the ‘disappeared,’ efforts by a (former) non-state armed group to address its legacy of violence, the utility of a limited immunity mechanism to incentivise information provision, and the interplay between silence and memory in the shaping of a collective, societal understanding of the ‘disappeared.’
The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is the third modern international criminal tribunal supported by the United Nations and the first to be situated where the crimes were committed. This timely, important and comprehensive book is the first to critically assess the impact and legacy of the SCSL for Africa and international criminal law. Contributors include leading scholars and respected practitioners with inside knowledge of the tribunal, who analyze cutting-edge and controversial issues with significant implications for international criminal law and transitional justice. These include joint criminal enterprise; forced marriage; enlisting and using child soldiers; attacks against United Nations peacekeepers; the tension between truth commissions and criminal trials in the first country to simultaneously have the two; and the questions of whether it is permissible under international law for states to unilaterally confer blanket amnesties to local perpetrators of universally condemned international crimes.
