This publication provides an overview of the essential best practices guiding the main aspects of a truth commission, answering basic questions relating to its goals, powers, operations, framework, protections for commissioners and witnesses, and reporting. Its intention is to provide practical guidelines for practitioners, commission staff, and political leaders on a wide spectrum of experiences that can be adapted to suit the unique social, political, and legal context of the state.

There is now an opportunity to design and implement a reparations program for victims of human rights and humanitarian law violations in Uganda. As with other countries emerging from conflict, the contours of a Ugandan reparations policy have been the subject of extended debate and generated high expectations. While the government has embarked on several reconstruction, recovery, humanitarian, and development programs for the north and other conflict-affected parts of the country, these programs were explicitly motivated by stabilization, development, and poverty-reduction objectives, rather than justice and reparations goals. This report examines approaches for identifying and categorizing victims, defining benefits and beneficiaries, and sequencing the delivery of reparations, offering guidance in assessing how the needs of the most vulnerable victims can be met and what long-term capacities must be put in place to implement a comprehensive reparations program.

This joint report by ICTJ and the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (ELSHAM-Papua) provides important insight into the ongoing debate on steps required to achieve a sustainable peace in Papua. The report reviews Papua's recent history within a transitional justice framework, and provides expert recommendations on truth seeking, justice, reparations, institutional reform, and enforcing the rights of women victims. Based on more than 100 interviews carried out in 2011 in the districts of Sorong, Manokwari, Biak, and Paniai, the report reviews Papua’s recent history, including the Special Autonomy Law governing the relationship between the Papua province and Indonesia, within a transitional justice framework.

The conviction of Thomas Lubanga is a milestone for the international criminal justice system established by the Rome Statute, and may make an important contribution to the development and definition of the right to reparations in international human rights law. ICTJ has produced a briefing note examining the practical and legal issues surrounding the ICC's decision in regards to reparations in the Lubanga case, as well as what lessons the ICC can learn from the broader experiences of the transitional justice field.