Transitional Justice - Future Agenda

Future Agenda

Although transitional justice is engulfed by many critical challenges in addition to the difficulty in measuring its impact, given the number of other factors in any given country’s experience over time, human rights trials or truth commissions need not have a negative effect on human rights practices. This makes transitional justice viable, especially in this age of state-building and democracy promotion in post-conflict societies. In fact, Sikkink and Walling’s comparison of human rights conditions before and after trials in Latin American countries with two or more trial years showed that eleven of the fourteen countries had better Political Terror Scale (PTS) ratings after trials. Latin American countries that had both a truth commission and human rights trials improved more on their PTS ratings than countries that only had trials. These statistics indicate that transitional justice mechanisms are associated with countries’ improving their human rights practices. Each state that employs transitional justice mechanisms will have to determine which mechanisms to use to best achieve the targeted goals. In order to avoid causing disappointment amongst victims, the state should also ensure that the public is well-informed about the goals and limits of those mechanisms.

Transitional justice shows no signs of decreasing in use. Indeed, the incorporation of transitional justice policies, tools and programs in peacebuilding and democratization process operations by the United Nations (UN) and in the programs by many local and international democracy promotion organizations, including, the Stockholm based International Institute for Electoral Assistance and Democracy (International IDEA) and a host of others as well as the establishments of other international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and networks such as the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the African Transitional Justice Research Network (ATJRN) are strong manifestations of how well placed transitional justice has become a feature in the discourse of transitional politics in the 21st century. Academic publications such as the International Journal of Transitional Justice are also contributing towards building an interdisciplinary field with the hope that future innovations are tailored for a specific state’s situation and will contribute towards political transitions that address the past as well as establish guarantees for respect of human rights and democracy.

The World Bank's "2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development” links transitional justice to security and development. It explores how countries can avoid cycles of violence and emphasizes the importance of transitional justice, arguing that that it is one of the “signaling mechanisms” that governments can use to show that they are breaking away from past practices. It also argues that transitional justice measures can send signals about the importance of accountability and to improve institutional capacity.

In September 2011 the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) published a report advocating the need to understand traditional transitional justice measures from a child's perspective. The report identifies children as a large demographic too often excluded from traditional transitional justice measures. In order to correct this imbalance, a new child-centered perspective is needed to incorporate children into the larger scope of transitional justice.