39 results

As part of its mandate, Colombia's Commission for the Clarification of Truth carried out 68 processes of acknowledgment led or supported by a specialized team. These processes sought to acknowledge victims and the harms they suffered, as well as individual or collective responsibiliti...

Former guerrilla member Gabriel Ángel holds the microphone for former paramilitary member Nodier Giraldo during an event at the Truth Commission.

This comparative study examines strategies used by local actors to help operationalize reparations for victims of widespread human rights violations, while highlighting the synergies between these efforts and sustainable development. It is based on the fieldwork of ICTJ and its partne...

A women in colorful African dress holds a megaphone to her mouth

This study presents reflections on the peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia between 2003 and 2006. It seeks to contribute to strategies for negotiating with or subduing illegal armed groups, as well as for the general pursu...

In the foreground is a large pile of military rifles. In the back stand a regiment of paramilitary fighters in army fatigues.

George Floyd’s death reignited existing anger over American society’s deep and festering racial wounds. His death triggered significant social uprisings that have challenged the methods of policing that have emerged over the course of several decades. With a growing awareness of polic...

Three police officers kneel with several protesters at a demonstration.

At a time when truth-seeking and reparations initiatives are taking hold across the United States, this report offers reflections from various civil society-led truth-seeking processes. Drawing on case studies from the United States, Colombia, Scotland, and West Papua, the report iden...

People gather around a plaque marking the Greenboro Massacre outside during an inaugural ceremony

The global COVID-19 pandemic forced many countries to impose emergency measures, such as curfews and community lockdowns, to stem the spread of the virus. To enforce these measures, some societies have given regular police forces increased power to enforce the measures, while others h...

This report examines the preventive impact of transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia before the 2016 peace agreement. It finds that these measures have contributed to prevention by strengthening institutional responses to rights violations, shaping the public agenda, developing a...

This report summarizes the findings of an ICTJ research project on the contribution of transitional justice to prevention. Drawing from five country case studies, it contends that addressing the past can help to prevent the recurrence not only of human rights violations but also viole...

A young person with back facing the viewer is wearing a T-shirt that reads “Colombia in Peace"

Lebanon has long been afflicted by a combination of political deadlock and a lack of accountability that has resulted in ongoing human rights violations and overall systemic rot. Comprehensive reforms, along with an inclusive truth-seeking process, broad public dialogue, and other way...

Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP) aims to achieve criminal accountability through a mixed system of restorative and retributive justice. Generally speaking, the SJP envisions large-scale restorative justice measures involving public acknowledgments of responsibility, as ...

In February 2019, ICTJ hosted an international symposium on gender and transitional justice in Tunisia that brought together representatives from eight countries where ICTJ has been actively engaged in implementing a gender-focused approach to its programming. This briefing paper pres...

This report aims to help practitioners in the transitional justice field to understand the experience of establishing and operating hybrid courts and to address some common assumptions about these entities. To do so, it looks at hybrid or mixed courts in practice, drawing on experienc...

Although youth are key political and social stakeholders who have much to contribute to—and gain from—transitional justice processes, they often remain marginalized from such processes or are given only a limited and predetermined space in which to engage. In recent years, the peacebu...

Lebanon’s civil war continues to impact the Lebanese people, both those who lived through the war and those born after it. While the widespread harms it caused are still visible today, the official denial of both the war and its lasting consequences has left a hole in Lebanon’s histor...

In transitional contexts, reporting does not simply present the facts, but instead shapes the parameters for interpreting divisive political issues. Coverage in such polarized contexts can mitigate or obscure the substance of transitional justice efforts to establish what happened, wh...

In this briefing paper ICTJ addresses one of the crucial points of the peace negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP): the possibility of providing recourse to the broadest amnesty possible and pardons as pa...

This manual was created as part of the Framework Cooperation Agreement between the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Attorney General’s Office, with the aim of providing technical assistance to the National Unit for Analysis and Context (UNAC) and supporting the de...

This study provides expert financial and operational analysis and information to help facilitate the establishment of an Independent National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared in Lebanon, as envisaged in a draft consolidated bill now before the Lebanese Parliament. ...

This report examines Colombia’s Victims and Land Restitution Law (2011), which provides comprehensive reparations to conflict victims and restitution to victims of forced displacement who rely on land for their livelihoods – and assesses the challenges of implementing the law under cu...

This paper weighs the possible modes and competing policy objectives of punishing FARC members for serious crimes in the context of Colombia’s ongoing peace negotiations. It argues that punishment has to occur in a way that does not damage one of the underlying objectives of the peace...

This report examines the impact on women of enforced disappearances committed during Lebanon’s civil war, focusing in particular on the effects on wives of the missing or disappeared—and their children. The research is based on interviews conducted by ICTJ with 23 wives of missing or ...

This document presents wide-ranging recommendations for political and social reforms in Lebanon developed by a consortium of Lebanese civil society actors, as part of an ICTJ project. Directed at Lebanese authorities, the recommendations address the well-documented and widespread viol...

This report presents qualitative data collected by ICTJ on how individuals in Greater Beirut talk about the Lebanon wars and the need for truth, justice, and an end to violence in their country. For the study, 15 focus group discussions were held in 5 neighborhoods in Greater Beirut, ...

More than fifty years of conflict in Colombia have left hundreds of thousands of victims of multiple forms of violence, such as forced disappearance, murder, extra-judicial executions, kidnappings, torture and various forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape.

This report examines the situation of impunity in Lebanon that has persisted since the 1975-1990 war through the lenses of core elements of transitional justice. It analyzes Lebanon’s past experience of ineffective transitional justice measures -- including limited domestic trials, na...

This report compiles information on hundreds of incidents of serious human rights violations that occurred in Lebanon from 1975 to 2008, including mass killings, enforced disappearances, assassinations, forced displacement, and the shelling of civilian areas. It reveals patterns of vi...

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with support from the Governments of Denmark and South Africa, and in close consultation with the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute (ASP), held a...

An internal armed conflict involving the government, leftist guerrillas, and a variety of paramilitary groups and criminal bands has endured in Colombia for the last 60 years, generating massive levels of displacement. A comprehensive truth commission that investigates major human ri...

This paper examines the relationship between forced displacement and transitional justice in Colombia from a gender perspective. The text focuses on three main themes: first, the gendered impacts of forced displacement; second, the ways that official policy, as it has evolved from pr...

The crime of forced displacement has been a widespread practice in Colombia’s internal armed conflict for several decades. However, forced displacement cannot be reduced to an inherent or unintended effect of the conflict. The armed actors in the Colombian armed conflict—the army an...

“Through a New Lens: A Child-Sensitive Approach to Transitional Justice” analyzes experiences of four countries—Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Colombia and Nepal—and identifies some key lessons on children’s participation in transitional justice measures. Authored by Céc...

This article focuses on the results of an ICTJ nation-wide survey: Colombian Perceptions and Opinions on Justice, Truth, Reparations, and Reconciliation. Colombians expressed a strong demand for accountability and reparations and low support for lenient sentences. ICTJ demands the Co...

This is a compilation of cases from the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Colombia.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is an internationalized court that will sit in the Netherlands and seek accountability for a specific set of crimes in Lebanon. It remains to be seen whether or how the Tribunal might contribute toward accountability in Lebanon, but it is clear from ex...

In Colombia, the shifting boundaries between drug trafficking and political crime and the tension between security and human rights pose particular challenges for those seeking accountability for past abuses and respect for human rights.

Background of the generations-long conflict in Colombia involving the state, the guerilla group FARC and paramilitaries. The shifting boundaries between drug trafficking and political crime remain a serious obstacle to efforts to promote accountability and respect for human rights in ...

In Colombia, international crimes can be tried under the ordinary national jurisdiction as well as a limited number of cases under the Justice and Peace Law of 2005 (JPL). Neither jurisdiction has served to highlight the widespread or systematic nature of state-sponsored violence. ...

The DDR process in Colombia aims to guarantee citizens their fundamental rights while at the same time to create space for the integration of demobilized armed groups. It remains to be seen if the Colombian DDR and transitional justice model can be implemented such that it satisfies b...

The DDR process in Colombia aims to guarantee citizens their fundamental rights while at the same time to create space for the integration of demobilized armed groups. It remains to be seen if the Colombian DDR and transitional justice model can be implemented such that it satisfies b...