Resource Library

While Armenia may rightfully seek acknowledgment from its neighbors of the genocide and other egregious violations, for its part, it must have the courage to reckon with its own recent past in the 30 years since achieving statehood, which includes war crimes, systematic corruption, and large-scale human rights abuses against its own citizens. Failing to do so ultimately threatens the young republic’s democracy.

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.

In designing transitional justice in Armenia, policymakers, civil society activists, and international actors should remember those who have not had justice for so long: the families of those killed or injured in March 2008, the victims of torture and political detention, the mothers in black seeking the truth about why their soldier sons were killed, the old pensioners who live in cold and hunger, farmers and rural communities who need access to social services, and students and young citizens who saw that their hope for a better future required a revolution.

Regardless of how the world remembers Alex Boraine's legacy—or the success and shortcomings of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa—history will recall that Boraine withstood his own, and his nation’s, transitions to cement his legacy as an architect for truth and reconciliation and a champion for justice for victims.

In December 2018, we mourned the loss of ICTJ's founder, Alex Boraine. On December 12, Fernando Travesí sat down for an intimate conversation with Vincent Mai—ICTJ’s first chairman—to learn more about a life that we will continue to commemorate in the months and years to come.

Dr. Alex Boraine, founder of the ICTJ, was larger than life. In his long career, he touched the lives of thousands in his beloved South Africa and around the world.

From October 1 to October 5, 2018, ICTJ hosted its eleventh intensive course on transitional justice in collaboration with the International Peace Center for in Barcelona. Participants included leaders in their respective fields, including human rights law, community justice and legal services, peacebuilding, education, and humanitarian affairs.

Enforced disappearances continue to affect hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The hopes of Sri Lankan victims reached a peak in 2015, when President Maithripala Sirisena was elected on a centrist platform and a commitment to truth, justice, and reconciliation. Later that year, the Sri Lankan government agreed to a UN Human Rights Council resolution that offered a roadmap for the search for the missing and forcibly disappeared. To the dismay of many, however, the government has done little since to implement these commitments and to take the opinions of victims seriously.

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.

Can education help right the wrongs of the past, especially when the majority of the population was affected by those wrongs? Teboho Moja examines that question in the context of South Africa, where efforts to reform a discriminatory educational system and redress its consequences have been met with mixed results.

Understanding education as a form of both reconstruction and reparations is essential for societies in their efforts to address victims’ rights and help victims and their families overcome the consequences of a painful past.

In early May, the African National Congress (ANC) held on to power in South Africa’s general election. However, there is a widespread feeling that the party that oversaw the creation of the groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission has walked away from its obligations to the South African people.

Reparations seek to recognize and address the harms suffered by victims of systematic human rights violations. ICTJ’s Reparative Justice program provides knowledge and comparative experience on reparations to victims' groups, civil society and policymakers worldwide. In this edition of the ICTJ Program Report, we look at ICTJ's work on reparations in dynamic transitional contexts such as Nepal, Colombia, Peru, DRC, and Uganda.

As the world marks August 30, the International Day of the Disappeared, we are reminded that forced disappearances and transitional justice share a common history. Indeed, processes working in concert that came to form the field of transitional justice were born from the search for truth and justice about the disappeared.

ICTJ spoke with Pablo Parenti about the trial that just concluded which investigated human rights violations and crimes against humanity that occurred at the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), used as a detention and torture center during the Argentine dictatorship.

ICTJ interview with Pablo Parenti, of the Attorney General’s Unit for coordination and monitoring cases involving violations of human rights during the Argentine dictatorship.

On May 11, the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DOJ) invited comments on new regulations governing the distribution of reparations to victims of the apartheid era in the form of medical and educational benefits. Civil society organizations and groups representing survivors’ interests have raised concerns regarding the scope of the regulations, as well as the DOJ’s overall failure to engage with survivors and consider their views when drafting reparations policies.