Volume 11 : 1
Editorial: Critical Issues in Transitional Justice – A Sisyphean Exercise
Examining the Criticisms Levelled against Transitional Justice: Towards an Understanding of the State of the Field
After Things Fall Apart: Challenges for Transitional Justice Futures
Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations
Reparations in Transitional Justice: Justice or Political Compromise?
Rethinking Post-Truth Commissions: Empowering Local Capacities to Shape the Post-Truth Commission Discourse
The Socialisation of Transitional Justice: Expanding Justice Theories within the Field
Localised Justice and Structural Transformation: How New Approaches to Transitional Justice Pull in Different Directions
The Enduring Colonial Legacies of Land Dispossessions and the Evolving Property Rights Legal Discourses: Whither Transitional Justice?
Editorial: Critical Issues in Transitional Justice – A Sisyphean Exercise
Examining the Criticisms Levelled against Transitional Justice: Towards an Understanding of the State of the Field
After Things Fall Apart: Challenges for Transitional Justice Futures
Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations
Reparations in Transitional Justice: Justice or Political Compromise?
Rethinking Post-Truth Commissions: Empowering Local Capacities to Shape the Post-Truth Commission Discourse
The Socialisation of Transitional Justice: Expanding Justice Theories within the Field
Localised Justice and Structural Transformation: How New Approaches to Transitional Justice Pull in Different Directions
The Enduring Colonial Legacies of Land Dispossessions and the Evolving Property Rights Legal Discourses: Whither Transitional Justice?
Year
2017
Volume
11
Number
1
Page
41
Language
English
Court
Reference
S. ROBINS, “Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations”, HRILD 2017, nr. 1, 41-58
Recapitulation
Transitional justice represents itself as both a discourse and practice that exists primarily to support victims of human rights violations and gains its moral legitimacy from the fact that victims are deserving and the claim that transitional justice has the aim of acknowledging victims and providing redress. Here, this claim is interrogated in the light of a practice that actually appears to be rooted in liberal state-building and for which victims are an essential instrument of prescribed mechanisms of transitional justice, such as trials and truth commissions. Evidence is presented that, despite a common rhetoric claiming that transitional justice is ‘victim-centred’, its principal mechanisms, namely trials and truth commissions, are actually driven by the needs of the state. A dominant legalism has seen mechanisms such as prosecution privileged over those that serve victims, such as reparation. One result of this institutionalisation of transitional justice processes is that victims have little agency in such processes and participate as instruments of those mechanisms, rather than on their own terms. Social and economic rights remain largely ignored by transitional justice mechanisms, despite these being central to both the addressing of victims’ needs and the causes of conflict. It is posited that rather than being driven by victims, transitional justice is an arm of global liberal, and oft en neoliberal, governance, sometimes sustaining systems that create many of the needs that victims articulate.
