FAILING VICTIMS? THE LIMITS OF
TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN ADDRESSING
THE NEEDS OF VICTIMS OF VIOLATIONS
Simon Robins*
Abstract
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 often neoliberal, governance, sometimes sustaining systems that
create many of the needs that victims articulate.
Keywords: transitional justice; victims; human rights
1. INTRODUCTION
Transitional justice is now established as an approach that an array of powerful actors
reflexively turns to when a state is emerging from conflict or authoritarianism. Rooted
* Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York, UK.
Contact Simon Robins at simon.robins@simonrobins.com.
11 HR&ILD 1 (2017) 41