Transitional Justice

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As Transitional Justice ( Transition - Transition) are called processes practices and organizational forms, aimed at crimes of a violent past, a community for a socio-political upheaval work up, the process of transition (eg, civil war, political change, the overthrow of the previous government.) from a dictatorship to a democracy or from war to peace.

There can be a considerable difference between the interests of the state and the interests of civil society , which puts additional strain on the transition process.

term

The term transitional justice did not gain acceptance in research and practice until the late 1990s and was recognized as an independent field of research. The term was in the form of Neil Kritz in Transitional Justice. How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (1995) used and shaped.

A clear and recognized definition of transitional justice is not yet available.

Definition of terms

Whether and to what extent the term transitional justice can be distinguished from collective coping with the past or coming to terms with the past has not yet been clarified.

aims

The aim of transitional justice is to make known and known crimes of a previous violent past of a community public and to initiate social discussion and to find solutions, for example:

  • to counteract forgetting,
  • to disclose previously secret processes or processes known to only a few people,
  • To define responsibility
  • Recognize sacrifice.

Transitional Justice, understood as a process, does not aim to enable victorious justice ( retribution of the winners against the defeated), but rather aims to achieve long-term reconciliation. As a rule, this also includes, and in particular, the (re) integration of the perpetrators and their accomplices into society.

Legal basis of transitional justice

In the area of international law , states are obliged under the UN Charter and various international agreements to guarantee their own citizens basic human rights in every situation in the community.

In the area of ​​national state and constitutional law , states have a fundamental obligation to protect citizens. This obligation arises from the purpose of the state itself.

Instruments of Transitional Justice

Legal and sociopolitical (extrajudicial) instruments, procedures and mechanisms are used to come to terms with the violent past of a community. Every transition situation is unique and requires different concepts and weightings.

Legal instruments

Legal instruments of transitional justice can be, for example:

  • Disarmament, demobilization, armistice etc.
  • Strengthening state sovereignty and preventing further crimes
  • Institutional reforms (mostly especially of internal administration, the security sector and the military)
  • Creation of the legal framework for the process of transitional justice
  • Provision of technical, material and financial support for all necessary processes for processing and reconciliation
  • Definition of a "transition period" or "transition key date" (see also: Final Line Act )
  • Protection of (critical) media and human rights organizations
  • public judicial criminal proceedings against those responsible (see also: international criminal law )
  • Truth commissions
  • Removal of "incriminated" persons from public office ( lustration )
  • general amnesties or amnesties for people who cooperate with the judiciary and / or disclose their crimes
  • Making amends for the victims or their survivors
  • Return of property and reversal of unjustified property shifts through restitution

Sociopolitical instruments

Sociopolitical (non-legal) instruments of transitional justice can be, for example:

  • Willingness for permanent change, discussion, reconciliation, etc.
  • broad consolidation of state sovereignty
  • Formation of victim organizations and / or human rights organizations
  • Respect and guarantee of human rights (also for the perpetrators)
  • Processing of the causes of the conflict (e.g. in public spaces, in churches and schools, supported by university research)
  • Recognition of all victims, regardless of their origin, religion, ethnicity, class, language, etc.
  • collective remembrance (e.g. through memorial days, public holidays)
  • Create memory spaces (e.g. museums, memorials, memorials, etc.)
  • Re-integration of the perpetrators into the community
  • Disclosure and / or documentation of the crimes
  • Archiving and making the incriminating documents accessible

development

The concept of transitional justice emerged in the 1990s. However, the activists and scholars who advocate the establishment of transitional justice measures see themselves in the tradition of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and the comparatively peaceful regime changes of the 1970s in Greece , Portugal and Spain .

The main impetus for the development of the concept of transitional justice came from South American human rights activists. In South America , numerous dictatorial regimes were overthrown in the nineteen seventies and eighties. The demand to make known the "truth" about the human rights violations under the dictatorships was one of the most important concerns of the South American opponents of the regime. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the newly elected President Patricio Aylwin had set up in Chile in mid-1990 after the return to democracy , acquired particular importance . This commission defined “truth” as a goal for the first time, and with it the goal of “reconciliation”. With the help of the publication of an “official truth” about the crimes during the period of the previous dictatorship, the division of society into two camps, each with different interpretations of the past, was to be overcome. The idea that exposing the "truth" could help reconcile a society became a core belief of the transitional justice movement. Since the mid-1990s, she has campaigned in numerous so-called post-conflict societies (e.g. in Africa , Asia or the Eastern Bloc countries ) for the establishment of truth commissions to deal with human rights violations. The efforts of the transitional justice movement have now been accompanied by a rapidly growing number of scientists who set themselves the goal of further developing the concept of the truth commission on the basis of empirical studies.

The UN is actively supporting these reappraisal processes.

With the International Criminal Court in The Hague , an institutional body has been created since 2002 to provide legal support for transitional justice and the legal processing of injustice.

International Center for Transitional Justice

The International Center for Transitional Justice , founded in 2001, is an institution for advisory and research activities in the field of transitional justice.

literature

  • Action group service for peace (ed.): Civil instead of military. Experience with civil, non-violent conflict management abroad . Bonn 2006, ISBN 3-88815-000-0 ( Friedensdienst.de [PDF; 1000 kB ; accessed on July 1, 2016]).
  • Hagen Berndt, Bernd Rieche: Civil, nonviolent conflict transformation. In: Action group service for peace (ed.): Nonviolent fight for a just peace. Plea for civil conflict transformation. Oberursel 2008, ISBN 978-3-88095-176-1 , pp. 21-38.
  • Susanne Buckley-Zistel: Transitional Justice as a Path to Peace and Security. Possibilities and limits. (SFB-Governance Working Paper 15) (online) ( Memento from May 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  • Confederation for Social Defense: Information sheet for civil conflict management. (May 2009; PDF file; 609 kB)
  • Claudio Corradetti: Transitional Justice and the Idea of ​​'Autonomy Patriotism' in South Tyrol . In: Georg Grote , Hannes Obermair , Günther Rautz (eds.): “Un mondo senza stati è un mondo senza guerre”. Politically motivated violence in a regional context (=  Eurac book 60 ). Eurac.research , Bozen 2013, ISBN 978-88-88906-82-9 , pp. 17-32 .
  • Carmen González Enríquez, Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Paloma Aguilar Fernández (eds.): The Politics of Memory. Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies . Oxford 2001.
  • Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Isabella Bauer (Ed.): Civil conflict management: From aspiration to reality. B. Budrich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8474-0031-8 .
  • Sabine Klotz: Civil conflict management. Theory and practice. Texts and materials Series A No. 50 of the Research Center of the Evangelical Study Community , Heidelberg 2003 (reference there), ISBN 3-88257-049-0 .
  • Neil J. Kritz (Ed.): Transitional justice. How emerging democracies reckon with former regimes . United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington DC 1995, ISBN 978-1-878379-43-6 .
  • Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, Winfried Garscha (ed.): Justice after dictatorship and war: Transitional Justice 1945 to today; Criminal proceedings and their sources . Publications of the Post-War Justice Research Center. CLIO, Graz 2010, ISBN 978-3-902542-17-5 .
  • Javier Mariezcurrena, Naomi Roht-Arriaza (eds.): Transitional justice in the twenty-first century. Beyond truth versus justice . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-86010-9 .
  • Mihaela Mihai: Negative Emotions and Transitional Justice. Columbia University Press, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-231-17650-7 .
  • Christoph Safferling, Philipp Graebke, Florian Hansen, Sascha Hörmann: The monitoring project of the Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials (ICWC), Marburg. ZIS-online 07/2011, 564 ( online ; PDF; 126 kB)
  • Kathryn Sikkink in The justice cascade. How human rights prosecutions are changing world politics , Cambridge University Press, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-107-02500-4 .
  • Christoph Weller (Ed.): Civil conflict management. Current research results. INEF Report 85/2007 (PDF file; 1.3 MB)

Periodicals

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anne K. Krüger in Transitional Justice on Docupedia . See also definition in the UN report The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Countries. Report of the Secretary General - S / 2004/616.
  2. ↑ See also the conference Justice in Times of Transition in Salzburg (1992). Organized by the Charter 77 Foundation (now Foundation for a Civil Society). On the term see also: UN document of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) E / 1997/86 of June 27, 1997.
  3. ↑ See e.g. B .: Helmut König in “ From dictatorship to democracy or what is coping with the past ” in Helmut König, Michael Kohlstruck, Andreas Wöll (eds.), Coping with the past at the end of the twentieth century. Pp. 371-392.
  4. ↑ See e.g. B .: Theodor W. Adorno in What means: coming to terms with the past. In: Education to come of age. Frankfurt a. M. 1971.
  5. ^ Transición
  6. ↑ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa, is particularly important and pioneering . See also the Gacaca tribunals in Rwanda or "mato oput" ceremonies, Uganda .
  7. ↑ See e.g. B. the Community Reconciliation Processes, East Timor or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal .
  8. ^ Daniel Stahl: Report of the Chilean Truth Commission. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group on Human Rights in the 20th Century, May 2015, accessed on January 11, 2017 .
  9. ↑ See e.g. B. the Truth Commission in El Salvador 1992 (Comisión de la Verdad para El Salvador), the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
  10. ↑ International Center for Transitional Justice [1] .