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With enforced disappearances on the rise, ICTJ President David Tolbert says the path to prevention is clear: the international community must reorder its priorities and change its approach. The disproportionate attention on counterterrorism takes us further away from accountability and prevention, Tolbert writes. He urges the international community to lead the way in unequivocally censoring governments that use enforced disappearance as a political tactic — and ensuring there can be no impunity for this crime.

A new ICTJ report argues that in Africa's interconnected Great Lakes region, each country’s attempt to provide justice for past violations offers lessons for similar processes in others. We gathered civil society activists from across the region to discuss which strategies have worked for them, which have not, and opened up about the greatest challenges they face in securing justice.

South Africa Parliament faces a historic moment. In this op-ed, ICTJ's Vice President Paul Seils remembers the great hope that marked the ICC’s emergence: "No country embodied that hope and that reality more powerfully and more inspiringly than South Africa."

The Africa Union's resolution to collectively support a strategy to withdraw from the ICC looks more like a machination of those who have instrumentalized an argument against the court to protect themselves from the long arm of justice, write ICTJ's top experts on Africa.

South African authorities apparently believe that once the country has officially withdrawn from the ICC, it will be free to invite the likes of Sudanese President al-Bashir to the country. That's not so, writes ICTJ's Howard Varney, who explains why the country's obligations would continue beyond its departure from the court.

Amid deteriorating human rights conditions in the country, the lower house of Burundi’s National Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of withdrawing from the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the International Criminal Court. “Burundi should reconsider this ill-conceived decision, which undermines efforts at the national level to bring justice, peace, and stability to the country,” said ICTJ President David Tolbert.

Today, ICTJ opened a two-day conference in Kampala, Uganda, gathering activists and officials from the African Great Lakes Region to discuss efforts at redress and accountability for serious human rights violations committed in their countries.

Civil society leaders, members of victims' groups and state officials throughout the Great Lakes region will convene in Kampala, Uganda next week at a conference hosted by ICTJ. Attendees will share their experiences working for redress in their communities and discuss what strategies have proven effective at the local level.

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) condemns in the strongest terms the Egyptian government’s crackdown against human rights activists and calls on it to halt its ongoing investigation of independent human rights organizations in relation to the legitimate exercise of their activities and to close Case No. 173 (the “NGO foreign funding” case) once and for all.

After toppling Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in February 2011, Egyptians were eager for a reckoning with past injustices. But after years of political turmoil, the possibility of a genuine transitional justice process in Egypt is uncertain. We turned to three leading Egyptian activists to examine if there really is a chance for justice and reform in Egypt in the near future.