Justice as Prevention

Photo: New York, NY, October 2007. Dmitry Titov, Assistant Secretary-General for Rule of Law and Security Institutions at the UN DPKO, speaks at the book launch for Justice as Prevention. Photo by Nisma Zaman.

In early 2007, the ICTJ launched the publication of Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies (SSRC, 2007), the second book in the new Advancing Transitional Justice Series. Edited by ICTJ's Director of Security System Reform, Alexander Mayer-Rieckh, and Director of Research Pablo de Greiff, this edited volume presents the results of a uniquely comparative and comprehensive multiyear research project examining vetting processes in countries emerging from armed conflict and authoritarianism.

The ICTJ defines vetting as processes of assessing integrity-including adherence to relevant human rights standards-to determine suitability for public employment. Countries undergoing transitions to democracy and peace frequently use such processes to exclude from public service abusive or incompetent public employees.

Vetting, particularly in the security and justice sectors, is widely recognized as helpful in:

• reestablishing civic trust and re-legitimizing abusive public institutions
• disabling structures within which individuals carried out serious abuses and
• removing obstacles to transitional reform.

 

Until now, however, the topic has received little systematic attention and, as a result, many vetting processes are handled poorly and unfairly.

Justice as Prevention includes studies of past experience with vetting in nine countries, including:

• four former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe
• Argentina
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• El Salvador
• Greece
• South Africa

 

The book also contains four thematic chapters, which examine a number of critically important issues for the design and implementation of vetting processes, including:

• information management
• due process
• vetting's relationship to other institutional reforms and
• vetting's relationship to transitional justice.

 

As with all ICTJ research projects, this one was designed to produce useful results for both the academic and the policymaker and practitioner communities. On the basis of its research, the ICTJ developed operational vetting guidelines that appear in Justice as Prevention, but that have also been published by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as part of its series of Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict Societies, as well as by the United Nations Development Programme.

On the basis of its vetting research, the ICTJ also published Census and Identification of Security Personnel after Conflict. A Tool Book for Practitioners and provided input in the SSR Handbook of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For more information on the ICTJ's work in security system reform see Transitional Justice Approaches: Justice-Sensitive Security System Reform.

(Updated July 2008)