This report aims to help practitioners in the transitional justice field to understand the experience of establishing and operating hybrid courts and to address some common assumptions about these entities. To do so, it looks at hybrid or mixed courts in practice, drawing on experiences in five different contexts: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Timor-Leste.
This report focuses on “indirect victims” of human rights violations in Tunisia, namely, the wives, sisters, and children of political prisoners in Tunisia, who suffered discrimination, social exclusion, police violence, and harassment during the dictatorship. Presenting documentation and analysis, it argues that the transitional justice process in Tunisia must recognize the experiences of indirect victims and address the consequences of the violations they faced.
This report examines attacks on schools in Syria from multiple angles: from the legal implications of such attacks to the everyday impact on students, teachers, families, and society at large. It is the product of Save Syrian Schools, a collaborative project led by 10 Syrian civil society organizations and ICTJ that demands an end to the killing of Syrian children and justice for the bombing of schools.
This report aims to help local governments, victims’ groups, and other stakeholders in Nepal to understand the scope of and potential inherent in local governmental powers and to identify what local governments can do to design and implement initiatives that support victims of conflict. It concludes by offering detailed recommendations for local governments that are considering measures of reparation for human rights victims and other transitional justice initiatives.
By looking at the documentation efforts of Syrian civil society organizations, this paper challenges the notion that criminal prosecution is the sole avenue of justice available for alleged crimes in Syria. Documentation could be used for important other avenues of justice, such as acknowledgement, fulfilling victims’ right to truth, and informing and preparing future transitional justice processes. This paper makes several recommendations for what can be done with documentation to support Syrian victims.
This report is based on qualitative interviews with Central African refugees living in Chad and Cameroon, in which they were asked about their experience of displacement and their intentions and concerns regarding return, reconciliation, and justice. Refugees said that if peace and justice were to have a chance, they needed to hear a clear and strong message of inclusion coming from the highest levels of government that they are Central African citizens with equal rights.
This briefing paper focuses on the role of victims of human rights violations in criminal proceedings. This paper will provide examples of recent developments in the advancement of victim participation in criminal proceedings in international criminal law and domestic jurisdictions.
Pursuing justice in a transitional context may take the form of multiple measures and goes beyond the pursuit of criminal prosecutions. Tunisia’s Basic Law on Transitional Law, adopted in December 2013, is a case in point. Despite its flaws, the the law introduced a fairly comprehensive framework to redress past abuses and to hold perpetrators to account.
In some contexts, the global community has resorted to international tribunals to prosecute the most serious past crimes, such as war crimes, crimes against of humanity, and genocide. While these international efforts contributed significantly to international justice, they were resource draining and located outside the countries in which the crimes took place. To overcome these issues, the so-called hybrid court was developed that combines domestic and international law and personnel. Tunisia has adopted a purely domestic hybrid court.
Although youth are key political and social stakeholders who have much to contribute to—and gain from—transitional justice processes, they often remain marginalized from such processes or are given only a limited and predetermined space in which to engage. In recent years, the peacebuilding field, in reflecting on what it means to meaningfully engage youth, has advanced a more nuanced framework that focuses on youth as agents of change.