On 21-23 June 2013, No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) and Freedom House organised a “Practitioners’ Dialogue on Transitional Justice: Pre-transition and Non-transition Country Contexts”, which was held in Istanbul, Turkey.
This Dialogue focused on the critical need identified by human rights activists in restrictive societies for political and social change and an end to human rights abuses and brought practitioners from pre and non-transitional societies to dialogue with practitioners from transitional societies. The main aim was to not only discuss evolving Transitional Justice (TJ) mechanisms and policies designed to create conditions for a normative break from a criminal past, but also to strengthen the capacity of participating practitioners (coming from Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, African Union, Burma, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, the UK, Mexico and Colombia) to further refine their own local TJ strategies and to design and implement the most suitable aspects of TJ processes in their own countries.
Questions at the center of this conference included: 1) Can any of the main goals of transitional justice – accountability, acknowledgment, truth-telling, reparations, reconciliation, institutional reform and memorialization – be achieved in the pre-transition and non-transition contexts? If so, to what degree and how? And, what might follow? 2) What mechanisms, tools, and lessons-learned can be shared among practitioners to accelerate or undergird transitional justice processes?
The information shared at the Dialogue will be synthesized and made available to the relevant public, as well as aim to alter existing legal TJ frameworks. The conclusions and recommendations resulting from this event will be shared with other transitional justice practitioners and academics, bi- and multi-lateral organizations, donors, as well as with policymakers currently drafting regional and global frameworks within the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) and the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-recurrence to influence United Nations (UN) work in TJ.
Documentation
For further information, contact Gianluca Eramo on geramo@npwj.org or +32-2-548-3912 or Nicola Giovannini on ngiovannini@npwj.org or +32-2-548-3915.
