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Hybrid courts have ranged from the ad hoc international Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR respectively), to the treaty-based Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), to international assistance to specialized units within national systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. This paper was prepared for the conference "Fighting Impunity in Peacebuilding Contexts" in The Hague, in September 2009.

Reparations play a unique role within the transitional justice framework in providing justice for victims.

In the absence of governmental action or as preparation for it, some local communities or civil society groups sometime seek to recognize and investigate the legacy of past human rights abuses. Such actions can help lead to more formal transitional justice approaches, including truth commissions, vetting and prosecutions.

Both of the books reviewed here provide deep analysis regarding the challenges of repairing historical mass crimes and past harmful policies, aswell as the limitations and difficulties of such endeavors.

Of the many challenges that arise when negotiating a transition to peace and an end of war, one of the most difficult can be the tension between prioritizing peace and insisting equally on justice for crimes of the war.

The design and implementation of reparations for victims in the aftermath of large-scale and serious human rights violations is an area rife with challenges.

Of the 26 countries in the lowest bracket of the UN Development Programme’s 2008 Human Development Index, six have large victim communities expecting reparations as a result of truthseeking and criminal justice measures.

Much of ICTJ’s work—and in fact much of the field of transitional justice—can be understood as the pursuit of effective remedies for victims of severe human rights violations. A remedy involves two elements: a victim’s access to the appropriate authorities to have his claim fairly heard and decided; and the redress or relief that he can receive.

In the aftermath of a conflict, a census and identification program (CIP) verifies membership within one or several security institutions, identifies their institutional boundaries, and helps ensure that individuals do not informally join or leave the institution(s). This report hopes to fill the gap by explaining CIPs in a way that is useful for actors involved in SSR and by providing practitioners the means to plan and implement such programs.

The relationship between transitional justice and security system – or sector – reform (SSR)1 is understudied, yet both contribute to state-building, democratisation and peacebuilding in countries with a legacy of massive human rights abuse. Reforming the system to ensure security agents become protectors of the population and the rule of law is of the utmost urgency, but the political and security context may pose serious challenges to reform.