Search

The protracted displacement of Palestinian refugees presents a complex set of challenges for the international refugee, humanitarian, and transitional justice fields. For the most part, these global movements have treated the Palestinian situation as a case apart: Palestinian refugees living in the areas where the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) operates are excluded from the 1951 Refugee Convention, and policies regarding restitution as a component of durable solutions to displacement have not typically been viewed as relevant to the Palestinian case. This paper explores the conceptual and practical challenges that arise when considering restitution for Palestinian refugees, and addresses these challenges in order to highlight the legal, practical, and political relevance of property restitution to reaching a viable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Recent years have seen an increased recognition of the need to address the housing, land, and property (HLP) rights of displaced populations in post-conflict situations; however, the implementation of restitution programs is challenged by the fact that in most countries affected by internal displacement, access to land is regulated under customary law and held under informal tenure.

Transitional Justice is often pursued in contexts where people have been forced from their homes by human rights violations and have suffered additional abuses while displaced. Little attention has been paid, however, to how transitional justice measures can respond to the injustices of displacement. Transitional Justice and Displacement is the result of a collaborative research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement. It examines the capacity of transitional justice measures to address displacement, engage the justice claims of displaced persons, and support durable solutions, and analyzes the links between transitional justice and the interventions of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors. The book makes a compelling case for ensuring that justice measures address displacement and that responses to displacement incorporate transitional justice.

Since independence Ugandans have endured episodes of violence and human rights abuses across successive political regimes and transitions with devastating consequences. During two decades of conflict in the northern Uganda involving the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government forces, human rights abuses were perpetrated against individuals, families, and communities. With the return to peace, the government, victims’ groups, and civil society are now considering how to move forward with a national policy on transitional justice that includes reparations for victims in the north given the magnitude of serious violations that were committed.

National healing and reconciliation in Uganda requires a multilayered truth-telling process comprised of community and national processes that are mutually reinforcing and should not be mutually exclusive, as proposed by the JLOS report. A national truth-telling body should address issues of state responsibility. Importantly a national truth-telling process would be in a strong position to solicit and consider submissions for institutional reforms and reparations proposed by community-based processes throughout Uganda. Additionally it could recommend the necessary measures to redress the suffering of victims and prevent the reoccurrence of conflict and abuse.

The report examines the measures taken in Nepal to redress victims following the 2006 peace agreement, which formally ended the ten-year civil war between the government and Maoist rebels. It looks closely at the Interim Relief Program (IRP) — a compensation scheme instituted in 2008 to provide material benefits to approximately 30,000 survivors and relatives of the killed and disappeared, who are categorized as “conflict victims,” and approximately 80,000 internally displaced people. Although the report welcomes the inclusion of two important categories of victims — those who were killed and those who were forcibly disappeared - it identifies a number of flaws that make the IPR fall short of international standards.

This report, produced jointly by ICTJ's Research Unit and the Children and Youth Program, is based on a comparative review of current and past efforts to reach out to children and youth as part of outreach programming for TJ measures. Drawing from the experiences of places as varied as Canada, Cambodia, Colombia, Kenya, Liberia, Peru, Nepal, Sierra Leone, and Tunisia, this report provides strategies to develop youth and child tailored outreach programs for transitional justice measures.

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 high-level retreat on “Supporting Complementarity at the National Level: From Theory to Practice,” at the Greentree Estate, in Manhasset, New York, on October 25 and 26, 2012. This report provides a summary of the principal discussions at the retreat without attributing views to individual participants.

This briefing paper sets out the obligations of the state and international best practice with respect to the right to truth, both as a key element of a transitional justice strategy and as a critical component of providing effective remedy to victims of gross violations of human rights and grave breaches of humanitarian law. It reiterates ICTJ’s long-standing belief that a truth commission is necessary in Nepal and that the search for the disappeared is an urgent obligation. The creation of effective truth-seeking policies and instruments is important due to elements of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and obligations contained in the 2007 Interim Constitution; but above all, it is essential as a means to realize the right to the truth. However, for truth-seeking to be successful, the instrument or instruments established to realize it must ensure its effectiveness.

There is now an opportunity to design and implement a reparations program for victims of human rights and humanitarian law violations in Uganda. As with other countries emerging from conflict, the contours of a Ugandan reparations policy have been the subject of extended debate and generated high expectations. While the government has embarked on several reconstruction, recovery, humanitarian, and development programs for the north and other conflict-affected parts of the country, these programs were explicitly motivated by stabilization, development, and poverty-reduction objectives, rather than justice and reparations goals. This report examines approaches for identifying and categorizing victims, defining benefits and beneficiaries, and sequencing the delivery of reparations, offering guidance in assessing how the needs of the most vulnerable victims can be met and what long-term capacities must be put in place to implement a comprehensive reparations program.