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During the past month, over 400,000 members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim community have been driven from their homes as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign led by the military. What lies at the root of the current violence, how is it connected to political transition, and does transitional justice have a role to play? ICTJ's Anna Myriam Roccatello answers those questions and more.

As part of its ongoing support of the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon, ICTJ organized a three-day virtual workshop on transitional justice for university students on July 12-14, 2021. The students all served as volunteers on a project to establish an archive of the committee’s work and activism over the past four decades and participated in a previous workshop in February 2020 that introduced them to transitional justice concepts.

This paper’s principal aim is to provide a cogent analytical framework on the range of possible or ideal relationships between DDR programs and amnesties. It assesses whether and how amnesties can serve to maximize the effectiveness of a DDR program, while doing the least harm possible to the transitional justice values of truth, justice, reparation, and reform, which arguably contribute to the effective reintegration of ex-combatants and hence to the durability of peace in the long term.

South Africa’s Constitutional Court recently made a landmark ruling on the right to speak the truth about crimes amnestied by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. ICTJ Truth-Seeking Consultant Howard Varney speaks about the ruling and its significance for South Africa and other countries.

In a new analysis, the 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 part of the treatment of the different crimes committed in the framework of more than fifty years of armed conflict.

Background on the role of amnesty in processes of transitional justice and the 2009 DRC Amnesty Law. Given a fragile justice system and culture of impunity, this law risks rewarding blanket amnesty for all crimes committed in the DRC. ICTJ gives suggestions to break the culture of impunity, and necessary reforms in order to bring about true justice and a lasting peace.

In February 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered its long-awaited reparations order in the case of The Prosecutor vs. Dominic Ongwen. Nearly two decades after the ICC intervened in Northern Uganda, this milestone decision both acknowledges the suffering of survivors and underscores the complexities and limitations of international justice. For victims who have waited for justice for over two decades, the order has been bittersweet.

This is the second of our Stories of Change series; in it, Tarek al-Massri, an 18-year-old from Homs now living in Germany, knows all too well the horrors of the Syrian conflict and its devastating impact on schools.

This reference manual offers a template for developing and operating an internationally-assisted criminal justice institution. It provides a practical basis for setting up such an institution from an administrative perspective, drawing on numerous relevant practices currently used in existing institutions. It aims to highlight the importance of flexibility and innovation, and comments on other areas of responsibility that overlap with administrative functions.

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed enduring legacies of repression. Some leaders have taken advantage of emergency measures meant to protect the population and curb the spread of the disease to instead crack down on civil society or political opposition and restrict civil liberties and freedoms. In this sense, the global health crisis has served a reminder of democracy’s fragility and the ever-present dangers of censorship, oppression, and authoritarianism. In Tunisia, where the wounds of the Ben Ali dictatorship are still fresh, the importance of this reminder has not been lost. In 2020, ICTJ’s office in Tunisia launched “Voices from Isolation,” an online campaign about historical memory in the time of a global pandemic. It encouraged Tunisians to remember and reflect on marginalized groups who have borne the brunt of the coronavirus disease the lockdown measures put in place to contain its spread.  The Voices from Isolation campaign included the “Create to Connect” art contest. The competition was open to emerging and mid-career Tunisian artists as well as artists for elsewhere but based in Tunisia. The artists, who work in a wide-range of mediums, all created the pieces they entered in the contest in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The situation with COVID-19 remains turbulent, and reflecting on one's own life at this time feels like a constant work in progress, which involves stepping back from the present in an attempt to understand its shifts,” said photographer and third-place-winner Lotfi Gharini. The global pandemic brought to the surface and exacerbated underlying injustices, forcing artists to reexamine society, history, and their relationship to the world around them. “In this project, I let the past—embodied through my personal memories and childhood universe in Sbiba [a city in Tunisia’s Midwest]—serve as a starting point to explore and bifurcate three essential questions concerning the future. What can I know? What must I do? What can I hope for?,” explained Issam Smiri, a comic artist and the second-place winner. ”Confinement allowed me to explore this universe further and served as a creative catalyst.”  Through Create to Connect, ICTJ was able leverage art to spark important conversations about Tunisia’s past as well as ongoing inequality and exclusion in the country. It also shined a spotlight on Tunisia’s talented artists and encouraged them and others to continue their vitally important work. “The contemporary art scene and alternative means of communication have always served as a fertile ground for broaching difficult conversations about the past,” explained Salwa El Gantri, head of ICTJ’s Tunisia office. “The Create to Connect art competition invited artists and audiences to reflect on the role of art at the intersection of social, political, and economic turmoil in Tunisia. The artwork serves a vehicle of expression and self-representation for the oppressed and under-represented members of Tunisia society.”