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Bogotá, November 20, 2020—ICTJ and the Movement of Latin American Hip Hop Expressions have joined forces to cohost the third International Hip Hop Encounter, which will take place virtually this week from November 25 to November 28. The four-day online event will bring together artists and musicians from across Latin America and Africa along with activists, social leaders, and civil society representatives. The festival’s theme is the role of hip hop music and culture in uncovering truth, preserving memory, and resisting violence and oppression.

Over the last 15 years, the Ugandan government has implemented a series of recovery and reconstruction programs in Northern Uganda to address the social and economic devastation caused by the two-decade armed conflict in the region and set it on the path to sustainable peace. While these development programs alone cannot fulfill the state’s obligation to provide reparations to victims of human rights violations, if designed well, they can form a foundation upon which future reparations initiatives can be built.

The armed conflict in Northern Uganda, stretching across more than two decades, greatly affected the local populations, which suffered multiple forms of war crimes and gross abuses of human rights. This study assesses the opportunities for providing interim relief to victims of confli...

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, ...

During this global pandemic, how do organizations such as ICTJ continue with their victim-centered and context-specific work, when their staff members cannot meet face to face with partners bilaterally, much less at organized convenings? The answer to these questions involves both rethinking how to use tools currently available and developing or finding new ones.

It may seem trivial for me to write about why those who continue to mark July 17 as "International Justice Day" should finally stop calling it that. Many human rights groups (including ICTJ), United Nations agencies, and governments have been publicly using that phrase since 2010. It is for victims of massive and systematic human rights violations, including abuses that amount to international crimes under the Rome Statute, that it is important to end the misconception that the phrase encourages.

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.

This week, the International Criminal Court heard closing arguments in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a top commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda. Among the 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity he faces are 19 counts of sexual and gender-based crimes, including rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage—the widest range of such crimes ever to be brought to trial before the court. The case thus marks a milestone in the jurisprudence of these international crimes.

Tunis—On March 2-3, 2020, ICTJ is holding a conference in Tunis, Tunisia, on the fight against corruption and the recovery of ill-gotten assets as a critical element of transitional justice processes. The conference will bring together activists, policymakers, and experts from Tunisia and other countries in the global South emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule, including Armenia, The Gambia, Kenya, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Since the Gambia's Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparation Commission (TRRC) began public hearings in January 2019, an important part of the country’s narrative has not yet come to light or been publicly acknowledged: the experiences of women. This report brings forward the voices of wo...