Nanci Adler (editor) - Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

UNDERSTANDING THE AGE OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

GENOCIDE, POLITICAL VIOLENCE, HUMAN RIGHTS SERIES

Edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Stephen Eric Bronner, and Nela Navarro

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentinas Military Juntas

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

UNDERSTANDING THE AGE OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

EDITED BY

NANCI ADLER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adler, Nanci, editor.

Title: Understanding the age of transitional justice : crimes, courts, commissions, and chronicling / edited by Nanci Adler.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055139 | ISBN 9780813597775 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813597768 (paperback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Political crimes and offenses. | Transitional justice. | Truth commissions. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Human Rights. | LAW / International. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology. | LAW / Judicial Power.

Classification: LCC K5250 .U53 2018 | DDC 340/.115dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055139

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright 2018 in the names of their authors

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CONTENTS

NANCI ADLER

VLADIMIR PETROVI

WILLIAM A. SCHABAS

JEREMY SARKIN

STEPHAN PARMENTIER, MINA RAUSCHENBACH, AND MAARTEN VAN CRAEN

RICHARD ASHBY WILSON

THIJS B. BOUWKNEGT

NICOLE L. IMMLER

CHRISTIAN AXBOE NIELSEN

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

KJELL ANDERSON

UNDERSTANDING THE AGE OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

NANCI ADLER

Since Nuremberg, and more pronouncedly since the move toward democratic rule in Africa and Latin America in the 1980s, there has been a rise in understanding that bad pasts need to be institutionally addressed in order to create good futures. It has now become the norm that postrepressive, postconflict, postauthoritarian successor states confrontor support the process of confrontingthe crimes of their predecessor repressive regimes, both for the victims and for society as a whole. We may mark such an advance in sociocultural evolution as the Age of Transitional Justice. The expectation that an array of legal and nonlegal measures will be undertaken in the aftermath of mass political crimes is intended to provide a vital course correction to recurrent cycles of violence and impunity.

Transitional justice has generated a variety of strategic and tactical approaches for redressing often irreparable harms. These have included: international criminal tribunals, national or local legal proceedings, truth commissions, restitution, the accurate revision of history, public apologies, the establishment of monuments and museums, and official commemorations. Each of these, in different ways, attempts to incorporate the lived and narrated experiences of the victims, the witnesses, and the perpetrators. Such narratives bring the crimes into a shared public domain where they can be co-processed and critically evaluated.

The outcome of the convergence of multilevel narratives produced by many people and disparate groups can result only in an approximation of the full-scale of the targeted events. Nevertheless, even as we recognize these limitations, real things happen to real people who frame them as authentic experiences. While their narrative reconstruction of events is subjected to their interpretive framework, so, too, are the assessments of judges, truth commissioners, the public, the media, and opinion-makers alike.

Twenty years after the operation of one of the most prominent truth commissionsthe South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissionand, now, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) (both U.N. ad hoc tribunals) have wound down and closed, we are entering a new phase, one in which we are well-positioned to scrutinize the processes as well as the products of the age of transitional justice, even if only as a work in progress. Transitional justice is young in age and beset by growing pains, but we have gained some deeper understanding of the differential efficacy of transitional justice mechanisms, as well as the records they have produced. Pablo de Greiff, U.N. Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, has found cause for celebration in the fact that in the short span of twenty to thirty years, truth-seeking and justice-seeking have consolidated their efforts and have come to include more victim and gender participation. There is, however, less to be hailed when it comes to the fields engagement with impact issues, that is, what changes, improvements, and/or reconciliation these efforts actually brought to the affected, divided societies. Indeed, the consequences of transitional justice mechanisms are still unfolding. We are still in the early stages of exploring posttransitional justice trajectories and identifying the impediments to progress, but two obstacles that stand out are the challenges to amnesties and to some of the U.N. and Hague courts rulings. We can infer that these are reliable indicators of a larger disconnect and that more obstacles await.