Suchergebnisse

This chapter compares two attempts to apply transitional justice to Belgium: the special parliamentary commission established in 2020 to analyse Belgium's colonial past in the Great Lakes region; and the earlier process of designing an educational programme for dealing with societal polarization. The parliamentary commission was modelled on a truth commission, while the educational programme drew on experiences with using transitional justice tools in conflicted settings in the Global South. Where the first struggled with issues of representation and decoloniality, the second met with skepticism and rejection because transitional justice was understood to apply to the Global South. Inscribed in these responses to transitional justice were therefore the relationship between Belgium and its others in the Global South. The chapter demonstrates that in consolidated democracies engaging in transitional justice processes may challenge the legitimacy of existing state institutions and their associated narratives.

In Come Hell or High water: Feminism and the Legacy of Armed Conflict in Central America, Tine Destrooper explores the motivations, strategies and priorities of women's activists in Guatemala and Nicaragua. She explains how these priorities were shaped by the legacy of armed conflict and the presence of international aid agencies

In Come Hell or High water: Feminism and the Legacy of Armed Conflict in Central America, Tine Destrooper explores the motivations, strategies and priorities of women's activists in Guatemala and Nicaragua. She explains how these priorities were shaped by the legacy of armed conflict and the presence of international aid agencies.

Human rights are increasingly described as in crisis. One reason for this is that existing legal accountability mechanisms cannot adequately deal with intricate and multilayered human rights violations that occur in vastly complex social contexts. Thus, if human rights are to continue to offer a widely accepted framework for thinking about (social) justice, we urgently need to revisit the very notion of human rights accountability in ways that allow for better protection as well as for a more ambitious normative project. This requires re-focusing the debate about human rights accountability on questions of human rights normativity. This article explores which roles literature can play in this regard. It proposes the notion of literary accountability as a conceptual device to (a) recenter the debate around the normative objectives of human rights accountability, (b) offer modalities for ensuring some form of responsibility attribution, notably where other accountability venues are closed or deemed insufficient, and (c) operate within the paradigm of legal accountability to push the boundaries of this paradigm. What each of these three manifestations of literary accountability have in common is that they foreground the need for a more forward-looking and multi-dimensional approach to accountability that seeks to reconnect the normative reality of human rights on one hand, with their imbrication in the concrete worlds of law, politics, and practicalities on the other.

In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: The explicit attention to economic crimes and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the conceptualization of collective reparation programs. I discuss these innovations in light of the ongoing debate about the collective reparations dilemma in transitional societies, and notably about the ideal relation between (collective) reparation programs and development. The article then introduces the notion of disruptive reparations to theorize this relation in a way that foregrounds the need to consider and disrupt the political, socio-economic, and epistemic structures that facilitated the initial harm. This exercise acknowledges the specificity of various policy domains, and approaches them in a way that is fundamentally rooted in victims' justice needs.

The Philippines is not typically the focus of transitional justice (TJ) scholarship. Yet, it has had to deal with violent legacies pertaining to each generation of TJ and has installed several TJ initiatives in response to this. This has given rise to a densely populated TJ landscape, spanning different periods and regions and including both formal and informal initiatives within various TJ pillars. In spite of this plethora of initiatives, the Philippines can hardly be called a 'successful' case of dealing with violent legacies – with the recent election of Bongbong Marcos as the most striking example thereof. In this article I argue that this can be understood in light of the absence of a genuine TJ ecology: there has not been an encompassing approach in which various kinds of initiatives interact with each other based on intersecting normative objectives. I argue that the case of the Philippines holds broader lessons regarding the importance of a more ecological understanding of TJ. (JCSA/GIGA)

This article builds on theories about the expressive function of law and uses Structural Topic Modelling to examine how the prioritisation of civil and political rights (CPR) issues by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has affected the agendas of Cambodian human rights NGOs with an international profile. It asks whether these NGOs' focus on CPR issues can be traced back to the near-exclusive focus on CPR issues by the court, and whether this has implications for the creation of a "thick" kind of human rights accountability. It argues that, considering the nature of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal policy, it would have been within the mandate and capacity of the court to pay more attention to actions that also constituted violations of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR). The fact that the court did not do this and instead almost completely obscured ESCR rhetorically has triggered a similar blind spot for ESCR issues on the part of human rights NGOs, which could have otherwise played an important role in creating a culture of accountability around this category of human rights. Does this mean that violators of ESCR are more likely to escape prosecution going forward?

This article builds on theories about the expressive function of law and uses Structural Topic Modelling to examine how the prioritisation of civil and political rights (CPR) issues by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has affected the agendas of Cambodian human rights NGOs with an international profile. It asks whether these NGOs' focus on CPR issues can be traced back to the near-exclusive focus on CPR issues by the court, and whether this has implications for the creation of a "thick" kind of human rights accountability. It argues that, considering the nature of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal policy, it would have been within the mandate and capacity of the court to pay more attention to actions that also constituted violations of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR). The fact that the court did not do this and instead almost completely obscured ESCR rhetorically has triggered a similar blind spot for ESCR issues on the part of human rights NGOs, which could have otherwise played an important role in creating a culture of accountability around this category of human rights. Does this mean that violators of ESCR are more likely to escape prosecution going forward? (JCSA/GIGA)