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Of the 26 countries in the lowest bracket of the UN Development Programme’s 2008 Human Development Index, six have large victim communities expecting reparations as a result of truthseeking and criminal justice measures.

Reparations play a unique role within the transitional justice framework in providing justice for victims.

Hybrid courts have ranged from the ad hoc international Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR respectively), to the treaty-based Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), to international assista...

The principle of complementarity is central to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to this principle, the ICC should assume jurisdiction only when states parties are unwilling or genuinely unable to carry out their own investigation or prosecution. Th...

ICTJ calls on African states parties to the International Criminal Court to ensure fair and effective justice for serious crimes committed against Africans and others. Written in the lead up to the Rome Statute Review Conference in Kampala, May 2010.

This paper is meant to help the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the civil parties before the court and other Khmer Rouge period survivors and their families deal with practical and legal issues in the course of fulfilling the reparations mandate of the ECCC. ...

During the 1970s, political violence in Argentina resulted in massive violations of human rights including thousands of deaths, prolonged and arbitrary arrests, disappearances, unfair trials, pervasive torture, in addition to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Since the restorat...

On August 20, 2009, Afghans went to the polls for the third time since the U.S.-led military intervention in 2001. Accountability and justice were underlying themes in the election, as made clear by many of the issues that attracted public attention. Nonetheless “calls for justice” re...

The situation in Uganda presented a challenging first case for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The origins of the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government are complex, and many people in the north resent the government for failing to protect them fr...

Timor-Leste has implemented a number of transitional justice mechanisms to address the legacy of human rights violations that occurred in relation to the 1975 Timorese civil war and 24-year Indonesian occupation.These mechanisms have failed to provide victims with meaningful reparatio...