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To encourage public engagement in truth-telling and memorialization in Colombia, ICTJ and the Center for Historic Memory (Centro de Memoria Histórica) are pleased to announce a photography contest for non-professionals.

Argentina’s trials for crimes committed during the dictatorship of military juntas are widely seen as a successful national effort to seek accountability for past abuses. And while victims’ demands for justice continue to remain high, the judiciary is facing challenges to ensure the cases are dealt with expeditiously and fairly. In a interview for ICTJ's Spanish podcast series "Lessons from Latin America," Mirna Goransky, Assistant General Prosecutor for the Attorney General’s Office shares her perspectives on human rights trials in Argentina.

The ICTJ Program Report is a new online feature that presents ICTJ’s work and impact around the globe. Through monthly in-depth interviews with our experts, the ICTJ Program Report will offer a view of ICTJ’s work on reparations, criminal justice, truth and memory and other transitional justice developments in countries where we work. To launch the series, we speak with Paul Seils, ICTJ's vice president and the head of our Program Office.

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.

Displacement is one of the most widespread and tangible consequences of conflict, and has been chronically high in Africa’s Great Lakes region by any standard. This paper focuses on three salient gender-specific dynamics of conflict and displacement in the region that need to be incorporated within any post-conflict reconstruction or transitional justice effort. First, the paper considers the implications of sexual and gender-based violence against women and men at all stages of displacement (prior to, during, and post displacement) and the implications for transitional justice mechanisms.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between criminal justice and displacement that has taken place as a result of serious violations of international humanitarian law, and considers these issues within the context of justice efforts in the former Yugoslavia. It argues that in some transitional contexts, forced displacement can be so integral to the abuses committed in a conflict that the issue should be included in efforts to criminally prosecute perpetrators.

Although the conflict in Turkey remains ongoing and a political solution to the “Kurdish question” has not been reached, in recent years, the Turkish government has developed a series of laws and policies regarding the situation of displaced Kurds. The most significant of these policies has undoubtedly been the adoption of a compensation law for the displaced in 2004. As one of the few countries actually compensating the displaced for their economic losses, Turkey has often been pointed to as an exemplary case by the international community.

This paper examines the relationship between forced displacement and transitional justice in Colombia from a gender perspective. The text focuses on three main themes: first, the gendered impacts of forced displacement; second, the ways that official policy, as it has evolved from providing humanitarian assistance to seeking durable solutions, has dealt with the gender dimensions of displacement, and the role that the Colombian Constitutional Court has played in this process; and third, the gendered dimensions of the (incomplete and debated) process of transition—from the Justice and Peace Law of 2005 to Law 1448 of 2011 on Victims and Land Restitution. Finally, the conclusion brings these two processes together in an examination of what gender justice should look like for displaced women, particularly in the critical area of policies for land restitution.