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Indigenous peoples are among those most affected by contemporary conflict. The resource-rich territories they occupy are coveted by powerful, often violent groups. Their identity is perceived with mistrust, sometimes with hate. Indigenous communities live at a precarious intersection between unresolved historic injustices and the contemporary incursion of industry and political violence.

Established in 2004, Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER: l’Instance équité et réconciliation) was one of the first attempts made in the Arab world to address human rights violations perpetrated in the post-independence period. It also aimed to include female victims of human rights abuse into broader transitional justice programs. This publication analyzes whether the various transitional justice processes undertaken by the IER sufficiently fulfill the gender-specific focus of its mandate.

Seven years after its approval, the ambitious project to demobilize illegal armed groups in Colombia called Justice and Peace is in crisis. The fact that it has only seven convictions, most of which have been appealed and only one upheld on appeal, is seen as proof of its failure after so many years. The government estimates that, at the current pace, the process would take almost a century.

Following field research in late 2009 and a 2010 workshop in Kinshasa, ICTJ produced a report in French on the challenges of enforcing court-ordered reparations. This briefing paper outlines and summarizes the challenges and recommendations discussed in the report. It also proposes additional steps that the government, international community, victims and civil society organizations can take to address the failure of the DRC to fulfill outstanding orders for reparations, as well as broader measures that can be implemented, including non-judicial reparations measures.

This joint report by ICTJ and the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (ELSHAM-Papua) provides important insight into the ongoing debate on steps required to achieve a sustainable peace in Papua. The report reviews Papua's recent history within a transitional justice framework, and provides expert recommendations on truth seeking, justice, reparations, institutional reform, and enforcing the rights of women victims. Based on more than 100 interviews carried out in 2011 in the districts of Sorong, Manokwari, Biak, and Paniai, the report reviews Papua’s recent history, including the Special Autonomy Law governing the relationship between the Papua province and Indonesia, within a transitional justice framework.

In collaboration with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, ICTJ’s Research Unit examined how transitional justice can be used to address the range of injustices associated with displacement and thereby serve as part of a comprehensive approach to the resolution of displacement.Based on the project’s findings, this report provides an overview of the relationship between transitional justice and displacement and offers specific guidance to policymakers and practitioners in the numerous fields that share a concern with displacement, including transitional justice, humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and development.

In 2006, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) launched an unprecedented effort to document the violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan between 1978 and 2001. Though it has not yet been made public, the 1000-page AIHRC Conflict Mapping Report is the most comprehensive documentation of this period in Afghanistan to date. As new evidence of past violations comes to light, Afghanistan must prioritize transitional justice measures to break the cycle of abuse. The briefing paper entitled “Afghanistan: The Past as a Prologue,” provides analysis of past reports identifying the patterns of abuses and puts forth recommendations to the government of Afghanistan as it confronts new evidence of the past.

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 and its paramilitary groups, on one hand, and the guerrilla groups, on the other—have used the practice of forced displacement of civilian populations as part of their military strategies to take control of or maintain a presence in certain territories.

The reparations policy for victims of Peru’s internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1980 to 2000, includes the internally displaced population among its beneficiaries under the Official Register of Victims. However, displaced persons are given lower priority than the other categories of victims also included in the program, such as those who were killed or who suffered disappearance, torture, or other types of attacks on the right to physical well-being and life.

As with most post-conflict challenges, the issues of displaced populations and weak security institutions each have profound effects on the other. A common cause of displacement in post-conflict environments is a lack of physical security, either because formal security institutions fail to ensure it, or, in some cases, because those institutions themselves undermine it. Displaced individuals will not voluntarily return in great numbers if the same security threats that made them leave (or new ones) are present in their home areas.