Resource Library

To mark International Women’s Day, we invite you to read about four countries at the top of our gender justice priorities in the coming year, each with its own history, context, and complex sets of challenges.

The Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the first of its type in the United States, marks one year of work.

In December, ICTJ partnered with NYU School of Law and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice to host Auschwitz survivor and Judge Thomas Buergenthal for the 7th Annual Emilio Mignone Lecture on Transitional Justice.

Can truth commissions help secure a just peace following a violent conflict in which massive human rights abuses are committed? In this special series of the ICTJ Forum, we present a series of conversations with some of the world’s top peace mediators and truth commission experts, whose collective experience include years on the front lines of critical peace agreements in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Dating back to the 1980s, when peace settlements were made across Latin America, truth commissions have become an important component of peace negotiations. In this opinion piece, ICTJ President David Tolbert calls for societies to give truth commissions a chance of fulfilling their potential by learning from their failures and success.

More truth commissions are being created now through peace agreements than at any other time in history. But are they living up to high expectations for truth, accountability, and reconciliation in societies emerging from violent conflicts? This week, the Kofi Annan Foundation and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) held a three-day, high-level symposium to explore the challenges and benefits of truth commissions emerging from peace processes.

Next week, the Colombian courts will issue the first partial verdict in the Justice and Peace case against the paramilitary leader Hebert Veloza García, alias “HH,” one of the most significant cases of the Justice and Peace process. Ahead of the HH partial verdict on October 30th, ICTJ is launching a comprehensive timeline on transitional justice measures implemented in Colombia since 2005 that recognize victims' rights to truth, justice, reparations, and the guarantee of non-recurrence.

For more than 20 years, the Amnesty Law has hindered El Salvador from pursuing accountability for perpetrators of serious crimes committed against civilians during the civil war fought between the government and leftist insurgents in the 1980's. However, this may change in very near future. On September 20, the Constitutional Court admitted a petition claiming that the Amnesty Law passed in March 1993 –which shielded perpetrators of serious crimes committed during the 12-year civil war– is unconstitutional.

ICTJ welcomes the 6th National Event of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, part of the TRC’s journey towards completion of its mandate: to learn the truth about what happened in the residential schools, and to inform all Canadians about this history.