Transitional Justice Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Transitional justice includes approaches societies undertake to reckon with legacies of widespread and systematic human rights abuse, mass atrocity, genocide, or civil war as they move from a period of violent conflict or oppression toward peace, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for individual and collective rights. Often used synonymously with reckoning with the past, politics of memory, or decommunization, transitional justice became an increasingly important field of inquiry in the 1990s after a growing number of countries shed dictatorship as part of the third wave of democratization. Its etymology is unclear, but the phrase is understood to refer to the interplay between political transition and justice. Transition could be a regime change from repressive rule to democratic rule or a major political transformation from conflict and instability to peace and stability. Justice refers to the broad range of methods through which perpetrators of human rights abuses are prosecuted or vetted, victims obtain compensation and the chance to heal from the past, and societies reconcile by overcoming distrust and division. Transitional justice occurs mostly in new democracies that reexamine their recent past, but sometimes consolidated democracies feel the need to come to terms with abuses in their more distant past (e.g., slavery in the United States, the Holocaust in Western Europe).

Transitional Justice Approaches And Methods

Transitional justice approaches can be judicial or nonjudicial in nature and can vary widely in scope, purpose, and effectiveness. First, former dictators, secret political police agents, guards, and militia members may be prosecuted in national or international courts of law. The trials of Slobodan Milosevic, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, and the Berlin wall border guards who killed East Germans seeking to escape into West Germany, as well as the Nuremberg trials, are such examples. Trials might not result in conviction, can be flawed procedurally, and are seen as more or less legitimate. Second, lustrations allow post-communist governments to deny former top communist officials and secret political police agents the right to be elected or nominated to public office for determined periods of time. By 2006, most Eastern European countries had adopted lustration laws, although the vetting process, resulting in job loss, was bitterly criticized for infringing a basic political right. Third, truth commissions can be established by presidents, governments, parliaments, political formations, or the international community to investigate the activity of past dictatorial governments, past political regimes, or specific historical periods of widespread repression. Commissions usually end their work by releasing a final report establishing the truth about the past, compiling victims’ testimonials and oral histories, and naming—or not naming—the victimizers. Since the 1970s, more than twenty-five countries in Latin America (including Chile, Argentina, and El Salvador), Asia (Nepal and Sri Lanka), Africa (South Africa, Morocco, and Chad), and Europe (Germany and Romania) have set up such truth commissions.

Besides these three main approaches, there are other reparatory methods to reckon with the past. Local community courts of justice, or gacaca, were established in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to make the punishment of perpetrators faster and less expensive. Rehabilitation aims to reintegrate former political prisoners into the larger society and symbolically recognize their plight. Monetary and nonmonetary compensation can help victims and their families cover health care costs related to political persecution or the education of children disadvantaged by the loss of their parents. Access to the secret archives compiled by the communist intelligence services has allowed victims to see the secret records, while effectively curtailing surveillance of former dissidents and forcing the retirement of secret full-time officers and part-time informers. The restitution of property and assets abusively confiscated by former regimes can also bring a measure of justice to owners seeking to recover private dwellings, land, businesses, artwork, or bank accounts.

The transformation of former prisons into commemorative museums, the organization of itinerant or permanent exhibitions, and the rewriting of the school history textbooks can all help societies reconstruct the geography of terror and educate the public about the particularities of each repression moment. On a symbolic level, the national and official commemoration of both repression and opposition episodes keeps the memory alive and helps to prevent future atrocities. Last but not least, the change in names of localities, streets, schools, and public institutions can also heal the wounds of a repressive past.

Transitional Justice And Democracy

It is argued that new democracies engage in transitional justice because they seek to achieve justice for their citizens and to bring closure for victims; to establish civic trust and enhance social capital; to rewrite the historical record more truthfully; to renew the political elite and to marginalize public officials involved in human rights abuses; to reform their police, army, and secret police structures; to root out corruption and misuse of state resources; to show the international community willingness to break with an abusive past; to contribute to social reconstruction; to reconcile people and communities; to educate the national and international public; and to prevent future abuses. Thus, democratizing societies demand the halting, the investigation, and the prevention of human rights abuses through state-led systematic and often comprehensive transitional justice programs. Usually a combination of methods works best when trying to address the multiple legacies of trauma, but even in the most fortunate cases, the process is long, expensive, and tortuous, requiring sustained political will, committed popular acceptance, and a favorable international context.

Not all post authoritarian countries have prosecuted and punished: A select few have chosen to forgive and forget. While sometimes the serious challenges faced by societies emerging from conflict and repression and their unique cultural and historical contexts have served as excuses for inaction, other times countries were unable to engage in transitional justice even if they wished to do so. Political conditions in post authoritarian Spain and Mozambique prevented those countries from reckoning with their past in the years immediately following democratization. Failure of transitional justice does not always indicate public apathy toward the subject or public unwillingness to find out the truth about the past and to prosecute offenders.

Bibliography:

Elster, Jon. Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Gonzalez-Enriques, Carmen, Alexandra Barahona de Brito, and Paloma Aguilar Fernandez. The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Kritz, Neil, ed. Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute for Peace, 1995.
Stan, Lavinia, ed. Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge, 2009.
Teitel, Ruti. Transitional Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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