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January 29, 2007

ICTJ Releases Major Study on Gender and Reparations

Six Case Studies Reveal Gender Gap in Reparations for Past Human Rights Abuses

CONTACT
Suzana Grego
Director of Communications
TEL +1 917-637-3845
E-MAIL sgrego@ictj.org

NEW YORK, January 29, 2006-With support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and published by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has launched a groundbreaking new book, What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations. Edited by Professor Ruth Rubio-Marín, the book closes a significant gap in the literature on reparations by calling attention to the needs and experiences of often marginalized women victims.

Following two years of intensive research on the topic, the ICTJ and the authors of the individual case studies hope that the book's findings will influence and inform the way such programs are designed and carried out in the future. By analyzing the lessons learned from reparations efforts in Guatemala, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Timor-Leste, What Happened to the Women? provides a blueprint for ongoing and future reparations programs.

"Despite a general understanding that women often experience atrocity and conflict differently from men, reparations programs have been notoriously gender-blind," said Ruth Rubio-Marín, ICTJ project manager and editor of the book. "We've found that this failure not only undermines the positive effects reparations can have on efforts to build a stable democracy, but it can also actually perpetuate injustice and inequality for women."

Having identified a notable absence in available information and analysis on women's experiences, the Center began research on this topic in 2004 while conducting broader research on reparations. Drawing on six unique country experiences to analyze reparations programs from a gender perspective, the book raises several important questions and provides concrete recommendations for designing flexible, informed, and carefully considered reparations measures.

As more countries choose to grapple with legacies of past human rights abuse through truth commissions and other transitional justice approaches, the ICTJ believes it is vital to develop an increasingly nuanced understanding of how women are affected by and how they can influence transitional justice efforts. Not only will such an understanding maximize the efficacy of those efforts, but in the long-term, it can serve to empower women to play more active and pivotal roles in transitioning societies.

"This is much more than just a matter of equal access," said Rubio-Marín, the Center's expert on gender and reparations. "The unique nature of women's social and cultural realities calls for targeted approaches to facilitate their recovery from conflict and violence and to reintegrate them into their communities. Reparations programs that fail women not only undermine their fundamental goals of delivering justice, but they also miss a crucial opportunity to prevent the future suffering of women and to place them in roles that can facilitate transitions to societies based on human rights and the rule of law."

To read the book or purchase it online, click here.

For more information on the ICTJ's work on this topic, please see our Gender and Reparations research page.

The ICTJ's Programs on Gender and Reparations

The ICTJ views both reparations and a focus on gender as two key components in a range of transitional justice approaches available to help countries reckon with legacies of widespread or systematic human rights abuse. As women's experiences of political violence are often neglected in transitional justice approaches, the Center believes that its gender program must span every aspect of its activities and inform every angle of its work in order to meaningfully enhance justice for all victims.

The gender program works with the Country Programs Unit to ensure that a "gender lens" is integrated into in-country technical assistance. For example, the ICTJ is currently working closely with the truth commission in Liberia to help develop a gender work plan; train commission staff on the various gender dimensions of the commission's mandate; and facilitate opportunities for learning from gender experts who worked with commissions in Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. In Peru, the ICTJ gender program is working with local human rights NGOs and CUNY's International Women's Human Rights Clinic to develop amicus briefs in a key case dealing with sexual violence that took place during the civil conflict there.

Ideally, reparations programs offer a tangible response to the harms suffered by victims and restore the sense that they are legitimate rights-holders in society. The Center addresses how reparations policies can effectively satisfy victims' rights to redress and how reparations relate to other transitional justice policies, while dealing realistically with an array of challenging contexts.

Through research and in-country work, the ICTJ has developed extensive expertise on reparations, and demand for its services in this area continues to multiply. The Center's work has influenced reparations debates, policy recommendations, and legislation in Ghana, Morocco, Peru, and Timor-Leste, as well as within the UN and the International Criminal Court. In the fall of 2005, the ICTJ's advice to the Moroccan truth commission influenced changes in awards of reparations to women, shifting the criteria away from inheritance law to criteria based on their equality as human beings and on the nature and degree of the wrongs they had suffered. Other recent requests for the Center's assistance have come from Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, and the Philippines.

About the ICTJ

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. The Center works in societies emerging from repressive rule or armed conflict, as well as in established democracies where historical injustices or systemic abuse remain unresolved.

In order to promote justice, peace, and reconciliation, government officials and nongovernmental advocates are likely to consider a variety of transitional justice approaches including both judicial and nonjudicial responses to human rights crimes. The ICTJ assists in the development of integrated, comprehensive, and localized approaches to transitional justice comprising five key elements: prosecuting perpetrators, documenting and acknowledging violations through non-judicial means such as truth commissions, reforming abusive institutions, providing reparations to victims, and facilitating reconciliation processes.

The Center is committed to building local capacity and generally strengthening the emerging field of transitional justice, and works closely with organizations and experts around the world to do so. By working in the field through local languages, the ICTJ provides comparative information, legal and policy analysis, documentation, and strategic research to justice and truth-seeking institutions, nongovernmental organizations, governments and others.