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New York, January 25, 2021—"You cannot deliver 500 kilograms of transitional justice,” explains a high-level UN official in a new ICTJ report released today that explores the theoretical and practical challenges of measuring the results of transitional justice processes. These processes are complex and politically contested and are thus notoriously difficult to evaluate. The report offers key insights related to and tools for evaluating and monitoring transitional justice processes and assessing their impact.

Because transitional justice processes are complex, politically contested, and not necessarily linear, they present unique theoretical and practical challenges for measuring their results. This report seeks to improve monitoring and evaluation practices and support evidence-based proc...

Children, women, and men look at a wall covered in faces of people.

Invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction opens the door to the possibility of some accountability in circumstances where justice is not possible in countries where the crimes took place. This study considers the challenges facing the exercise of universal jurisdiction and asse...

As UN member states convene virtually this week for the annual General Assembly, they will likely focus on a narrow list of agenda items, topped by issues related to the deadly coronavirus pandemic and a global economic downturn. For this reason, ICTJ would like to recall the vital importance of justice for global peace, security, health, and development by sharing findings from an analysis of the open debate on transitional justice that the UN Security Council held on February 13, 2020, as part of its peacebuilding and sustaining peace agenda.

On March 2 and 3, 2020, transitional justice and anti-corruption policymakers, experts, and activists from the Gambia, Kenya, South Africa, Armenia, and Tunisia met in Tunis for a two-day conference to share solutions to a common problem: How can countries emerging from dictatorship, ...

New York, May 29, 2020 — Time is of the essence for breaking the deadlock over the release of detainees, abductees, and the forcibly disappeared in Syria, says a policy paper released today by ICTJ and the New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC). Coordinated action by the Syrian regime and other parties to the conflict, as well as the international community, must begin now, particularly as the spread of the coronavirus accelerates in Syria. The consequences of delay and a failure to act — for the detainees and their families — are likely to be calamitous.

In most cases, to be imprisoned in Syria is to disappear. Tens of thousands of people, if not more, have been unlawfully taken prisoner or held incommunicado in the context of the Syrian conflict. This policy paper examines the dark reality of detentions in Syria, its impact on those ...

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.

For the past few months, ICTJ, along with our partners at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, has been working on a comprehensive new policy paper on the situation of the many thousands of Syrians detained somewhere in the country’s vast network of prisons. The depravity that goes on inside these detention sites is already so appalling that it would have been hard to imagine when we started the project that the situation for the prisoners could get any worse. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, upending all of our preconceptions, and our lives, in ways none of us ever expected.

Today, we are facing a global public health crisis of unprecedented proportions. Only time will tell the devastating toll that COVID-19 will exact on human life. The breakneck speed at which the virus is spreading does not give us reason for optimism in the near future. We at ICTJ fully grasp the gravity of the situation, and we take our responsibility for the health and safety of our staff, partners, and communities where we work seriously.