Defining court-ordered reparations for victims of sexual violence committed during armed conflict, political violence, or state repression is not an easy task. The challenges only increase when there are few domestic precedents for defining such reparations based on international human rights law or international humanitarian law.

Education, as a critically important institution that is widely considered to be both formative and transformative, is something that transitional justice cannot afford to overlook. Transitional justice in its early years did not directly engage with education, but today this has changed. The field has moved from discursively recognizing the importance of education (though placing it beyond the ambit of transitional justice practice temporally and philosophically) to trying to find models for active engagement with it. Education can interact with transitional justice mechanisms in a number of ways. Its structural importance as a site of justice or injustice places it within the ranks of institutions with whose reform transitional justice is concerned (alongside security sector and judicial institutions, among others). In addition, education can be both a form and site of reparations for past harms to individuals and groups. However, this hardly exhausts the potential scope of the possible interactions between these two sectors.

A new ICTJ report finds that the time is ripe for Georgia to take meaningful steps to reckon with the dark chapters of its recent past and ensure that abuses never happen again. The report warns that while political conditions in the country may not be perfect, waiting longer to acknowledge victims and deal with the past may lead to more abuses and a possible conflict in the long run.

In the years immediately before the 2015 election, there was a palpable sense of waiting among those working in Burmese civil society. Many of their plans depended on one or two critical developments to take hold: the NLD coming to power and the signing of a nationwide ceasefire agreement. Now, both long-hoped-for events have happened, and Myanmar’s transition to democratic rule continues to move slowly forward. But certain shortcomings in Myanmar’s new political reality mean that activists, human rights defenders, and community workers are scrambling to understand current conditions and craft strategies to address the issues they care about in the delicate atmosphere of a nation coming to terms with the fact that an NLD-led government is not everything they had hoped for, though still better than those of past.