Safi Van’t land about inclusion of all society and in particular the marginalised groups in the design of transitional justice framework

On June 25-26 CivilM+ Platform and CSP Platform members met for an expert seminar “Re-establishment of justice and dialogue in the OSCE conflict regions – two angles of transitional justice“. We publish selected fragments of expert statements.

Safi Van’t Land, Impunity Watch (The Netherlands):

“We have been conducting the study on gender justice in western Balkans According to this study it appears that Women in rural parts of Bosnia who went through sexual abuse did not see justice and didn’t receive redress they still face stigmatisation and there is an impunity prevails. Basically that violence is considered to be normal. This is disappointing considering investments the transitional justice reform which has been championed by the western powers during thre last 20 years or so.

As a starting point I want to briefly mention of course that when we think about the holistic approach we need to acknowledge from the very onset that people experience violence differently. For example also different in the societies themselves and postconflict settings. And this is important to keep in mind. Thinking when we came in terms of transitional justivce we should think about the history and all this never again slogan, we have this key push for justice and accountability.

However criminal justice and this not necessarily lead to justice for a lot of victims. We see in 80s especially in Latin America this social and political movement which is driving change, the truth commission, the process where we see a lot of contribution from women, but not always were included in the formal settings. And here now we are trying to find this policy framework for transitional justrice, we could provide options for transitional justice. Lots of setbacks. We often see the disconnect between the dominant trend of transitional justice and the needs of victims and these two systems are not lining up. Some of the challenges the TJ is facing inherent to the implementation of the transitional justice: institutionalisation of transitional justice – the logis is often very top down, very technical approaches, toolboxes designed by international expertisa, practicioners – not always politically informed and context specific. We need to focus on symptoms, on immediate symproms of violence and we often ignore the root causes and the structures of impunity which is why we focus narrowly”.