Evidence of war crimes committed by the Syrian government is the strongest collected since the Nazis were tried in Nuremberg, according to the chairman of Commission for International Justice and Accountability Stephen Rapp. In an interview with The World Today, the war crimes prosecutor and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues said that his organization has accessed more than 750,000 pages of documents that record the atrocities committed by the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad.

NEW YORK – The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) has awarded the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) a grant of 40 million Swedish kronor to implement its Strategic Plan 2018-2022. During this period, ICTJ will respond to the growing demand for its services from countries in transition to democracy, as well as contexts where conflict or political repression are ongoing.

Ever since the armed conflict in Lebanon broke out in the mid-1970s, the main demand of the families of the missing and disappeared has been to secure the right to know the truth and the right to an effective investigation, verification of facts, and public disclosure of what happened. These families persisted in their demands over the decades, against the odds and despite social, political, and cultural forces pushing for collective amnesia. Their perseverance, along with civil society’s invaluable efforts, shined a continuous light on the issue of the disappeared, igniting a public debate that parliamentarians could no longer ignore. Last month, they voted in favor of the Law for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons in Lebanon.

On Friday, October 19, ICTJ welcomed the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), Ms. Cecilia Jimenez-Damary, at its headquarters in New York, where she gave an informal presentation. Jimenez-Damary’s eye-opening report on the human rights of IDPs  takes up the crucial importance of including the voices and concerns of IDPs in transitional justice mechanisms.