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On January 27, 2022, the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group will examine Uganda’s human rights record. The UPR process presents an important opportunity to spotlight the human rights situation in the country, and recommend actions that the government of Uganda should take to fulfill its human rights obligations.

In 2021, there were significant developments, some hopeful and some devastating, in the struggle for truth, accountability, and redress in countries around the world. ICTJ experts covered these events in commentaries and feature stories published on our website and in our newsletters. While 2022 is already underway and we at ICTJ are hard at work, we would like to pause a moment to take stock and reflect on the year that was.

On February 4, 2021, the International Criminal Court issued its judgment in the case of the Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen. The ICC found Ongwen guilty of 61 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Northern Uganda between July 1, 2002, and December 31, 2005. The verdict recognizes the enduring impact of the crimes on the victims, their families, and Ugandan society more generally.

Over the last 15 years, the Ugandan government has implemented a series of recovery and reconstruction programs in Northern Uganda to address the social and economic devastation caused by the two-decade armed conflict in the region and set it on the path to sustainable peace. While these development programs alone cannot fulfill the state’s obligation to provide reparations to victims of human rights violations, if designed well, they can form a foundation upon which future reparations initiatives can be built.

During this global pandemic, how do organizations such as ICTJ continue with their victim-centered and context-specific work, when their staff members cannot meet face to face with partners bilaterally, much less at organized convenings? The answer to these questions involves both rethinking how to use tools currently available and developing or finding new ones.

It may seem trivial for me to write about why those who continue to mark July 17 as "International Justice Day" should finally stop calling it that. Many human rights groups (including ICTJ), United Nations agencies, and governments have been publicly using that phrase since 2010. It is for victims of massive and systematic human rights violations, including abuses that amount to international crimes under the Rome Statute, that it is important to end the misconception that the phrase encourages.

Sparing almost no corner of the world from its wrath, the COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to every country. In an effort to slow the contagion, governments in most countries have been taking drastic measures requiring all residents other than essential workers to confine themselves in their homes, and shutting down vast sectors of their economies. The impact has been crushing. COVID-19 has profoundly affected every country where ICTJ currently works: Armenia, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Uganda. We recently caught up with ICTJ’s heads of country programs to learn more about the impact the pandemic is having on transitional justice and society more broadly.

When the government of Uganda signed the Juba Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation (AAR) with the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in 2007, it committed to establishing concrete measures that would promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice for victims of serious human rights violations stemming from two decades of armed conflict. More than ten years later, on June 17, 2019, Uganda’s Cabinet finally approved the long-awaited National Transitional Justice (TJ) Policy.