Military conflicts always cause a large number of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, and these violations, although in varying degrees, are characteristic of all parties to the conflict. That is why a special type of justice is needed in post-conflict societies – transitional justice, which implies processes and mechanisms related to the attempts of society to overcome the legacy of large-scale violations of human rights and humanitarian law. These include prosecutions, reparations, truth commissions and institutional reforms.

The First DRA and CivilM+ Forum on Eastern Ukraine, which took place on November 14 in Berlin, was dedicated to the issues of establishing transitional justice in Ukraine. All experts of the forum agree that at the current stage of the conflict development it is necessary to record and preserve facts about the committed crimes in order to understand the past from both legal and historical points of view, as well as to establish minimum conditions for bringing to justice all people who committed crimes against humanity – impunity leads only to an increase in violence. A prerequisite for the proper functioning of transitional justice is political will, which should contribute to the establishment of a single, universally accepted narrative on the experience of conflict.

Despite the uniqueness of each military conflict, the experts are confident that, even if it is not always ideal, recourse to international experience in establishing transitional justice can help Ukraine to avoid many mistakes and, above all, to understand what questions need to be asked at the stage of developing transitional justice in order for this mechanism to work properly.

On the video experts of the forum – Vesna Teršelič, (Centre for Dealing with the Past), Alexander Prezanti (international lawyer), Ralph Possekel (Memory, Responsibility, Future Foundation), Dmitry Makarov (Youth Human Rights Movement), Alexander Cherkasov (Human Rights Center “Memorial”), Oleksandra Matviychuk (Centre for Civil Liberties), Aleksandr Hug (former First Deputy Chairman of the SMM in Ukraine) – share their understanding of the concept of transitional justice for Ukraine and reflect on the role of civil society in this process.