Artículos Destacados

Agosto 1, 2007

Blockbuster Season for Transitional Justice

by Kasia Reterska

Spanning multiple continents and involving several hundred participants and attendees, Summer 2007 has yielded some incredible events. Here are highlights from three of them:

During the last week of June, the Center--together with the governments of Finland, Germany, and Jordan, as well as the Conflict Management Initiative--organized an unprecedented conference on peace and justice in Nuremberg, Germany. In numbers and prominence of participants alone, the Building a Future on Peace and Justice Conference was extraordinary. Attended by more than 300 dignitaries and practitioners from more than 80 countries, including representatives from governments, local and international NGOs, and academia, the Nuremberg conference was the largest ICTJ-organized gathering to date. Using case studies and in-depth dialogue, the objective of the conference was to bring clarity to and challenge the commonly-held notion that inherent tensions between the goals of peace and justice make the two mutually exclusive.

The Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg provided a historic backdrop to the opening ceremony of the conference. It was here that Nazi crimes were tried for the first time just 60 years earlier. Speakers addressing the opening event included German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Jordan's Minister of Justice, Sharif Al-Zu'bi, Sonia Picado, Chairwoman of the board for the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and personal representative of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The three-day gathering provided a unique venue for dialogue among stakeholders from the justice, peace, and development fields and covered issues ranging from peace-building to pursuing justice in situations of ongoing conflict. Four high-level panels and 10 concentrated workshops later, Nuremberg participants drafted a statement concluding that peace and justice are not contradictory forces, but can actually promote and sustain one another when properly pursued. Conference participants vowed to summarize the major findings and recommendations devised in Nuremberg. The resulting Nuremberg Declaration on Peace and Justice--meant to ensure that the conference will have a lasting political impact--is currently being written by a team led by Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Laureate Oscar Arias. A first draft is expected in the coming months.

The ICTJ was the academic force behind the Nuremberg conference, organizing three workshops: "The Impact of the ICC"; "Justice in Situations of Ongoing Conflict"; and "Lessons from Negotiated Justice Options in South Africa and Colombia." The Center also contributed significantly to the 18 papers presented at the conference. The papers, totaling about 626 pages, examined questions on peace and justice through the eyes of development agencies, justice practitioners, and peace negotiators. All of the studies can be downloaded from the conference website: www.peace-justice-conference.info.

Bogotá, Colombia
Nearly 6,000 miles away and just four days before the activities in Nuremberg kicked off, another unprecedented transitional justice event was under way. Situated on the high plateau in the Andes Mountains in picturesque Bogotá, where the Center opened an office in 2006, 150 Latin American and Colombian transitional justice experts and human rights advocates gathered for the International Seminar on TJ and Democratization in Latin America.

Co-organized by the ICTJ and the Swiss Government and with financial support from the United Nations Development Program and the Swiss, French, and Swedish governments, the symposium-which concluded on June 21st-brought together a diverse group of legal experts, government representatives, human rights activists, and journalists to discuss lessons learned, highlight best practices, and develop strategies for continued work in the region.

Bogotá attendees reviewed the record of TJ initiatives in Latin America and, although they commended the progress made so far in the struggle against impunity, participants also recognized the continuing challenges, particularly in the field of institutional reform. In many Latin American countries, unaccountable security forces and weak judiciaries discourage citizens to seek legal avenues to affirm their rights. The participants also identified other ways in which they could engage in the regional TJ agenda, including practical research, security sector reform, stronger protections for human rights defenders, drawing a clear linkage between TJ and the protection of economic, social and cultural rights, and promoting victim-centric judicial reforms.

An achievement for the region, the Bogotá conference resulted in several tangible outcomes: new TJ initiatives for the region; public solidarity and support for representatives of the recently-established truth commission in Ecuador; the "Sao Paulo Declaration" which announced an effort to declassify archives in Brazil; and support for a local truth commission in the state of Guerrero in Mexico.

Santiago, Chile
Midway down the South American continent, in Chile's capital of Santiago, the ICTJ collaborated with the Heinrich Boell Foundation, the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, and La Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLASCO) to put on the International Memorialization and Democracy Conference.

Bringing together human rights activists, policymakers, TJ practitioners, victims' organizations, and government representatives, the three-day symposium focused on memorialization as a means to preserve the histories of brutal pasts, while promoting democratic dialogue and societies. As the Santiago conference was under way, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced the creation of a "Museum of Memory," which was catalyzed by Santiago conference participants and served to reaffirm and strengthen the principles discussed in the conference.

Co-sponsored by the ICTJ, the Cultura de la Memoria (Culture of Memory) Film Festival ran concurrently with the conference through July 1st. Works by Chilean, German, and Spanish filmmakers dealing with human rights abuses and the preservation of the memories of Pinochet's dictatorship, the Second World War, and the Spanish Civil War were screened.

"It was physically challenging for me to attend back-to-back conferences in Bogota and Nuremberg, and I deeply regretted having missed the one in Santiago due to insurmountable scheduling conflicts. Despite that, I can't help but express how proud and grateful I am for all of the careful thought and hard work that the ICTJ staff and our many partners put into these momentous events," said ICTJ President Juan E. Méndez. "All three conferences were not merely revisiting old ground, but leading inter-disciplinary discussions involving practitioners and academics alike while uncovering ground in new areas including peace, justice, and memorialization."

Thomas Unger, ICTJ Program Associate, contributed to the Nuremberg piece.