Transitional Justice

In their work to increase access to justice for communities around the world, the Working Group on Transitional Justice and SDG16+ released a report urging policymakers and donors to support transitional justice as one important way to reduce the justice gap. In cases of extreme injustice—including in Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen—decreasing the justice gap is often primarily about stopping, addressing, and preventing the recurrence of large-scale human rights violations. To advance the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in these extraordinary circumstances, extraordinary responses, including transitional justice, are needed so progress toward the SDGs does not leave behind communities with legacies of human rights violations. Transitional justice efforts can put victims at the center of the work and make sure that victims are included in the justice process. Transitional justice can be adapted to different situations and contexts and is flexible about the form that justice takes. Moreover, it can also be designed to tackle problems of scale, address structures of injustices in the form of legacies of violations, and emphasize nonrecurrence. These characteristics make these mechanisms uniquely capable of addressing the justice gap in communities that have experienced repression and conflict.

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Digital trails could endanger people and organizations in various high-risk contexts. This session provided an overview of a data responsibility framework, the risks surrounding the use of communication channels with regards to metadata, and explored practical mitigation strategies. By addressing case studies involving whistleblowers, human rights activists, journalists and aid workers, the session encouraged attendees to ask relevant questions and take home answers for their own organizations.The session concluded with three key points. First, was a call to action, encouraging humanitarian organizations to avoid abstract discussions about metadata, but to engage at the ground level and produce tangible outcomes. Second, was to highlight that threat models are constantly changing and it is important for organizations to frequently re-evaluate the risks they are exposed to and reexamine their data responsibility framework. Finally, the Centre for Innovation presented an assessment framework for assessing metadata risks of messaging platforms. They underscored how important it is for organizations to better understand how metadata is collected and stored by platforms and be aware of the risks associated with using social messaging platforms.

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This session explored how and why African courts have developed as they did, and what they need to move effectively into the future. Using Burkina Faso as a test case, it looked specifically at how systems change theory can be applied to African courts to address the critical problems of trust and performance and create a more effective and just system moving forward.To this end, USIP leverages the following four principles at each stage in the process: Act locally – need to act within a system if you are addressing a complex system; Act deeply – follow a process that allows them to move from local events to broader patterns; define high leverage points; Act collectively – involve all systemic actors, “bring the system in the room” to move towards a shared understanding of the overall system; Act iteratively.

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Bridging the "justice gap" requires a mechanism to connect the beleaguered rights holder with the distant duty bearer. Among the most powerful and promising bridges is strategic human rights litigation. This session focused on Open Society Justice Initiative’s global multi-year study of good practices which demonstrates the ability of marginalized communities to win unlikely victories. OSJI’s findings included that there is a growing demand for justice through litigation as a means to bridge the justice gap. Individual strategic litigation cases should not be viewed as win-lose situations, but instead as a process where cases brought can help to change the political climate and public opinion and increase opportunity for positive changes later on, and that in order to be effective, implementation of court decisions must happen. Other key takeaways from the session included strategic litigation’s important role in bringing about structural changes, the fact that law must play a role in consolidating open societies, and the recognition that courts are one of the few places where activists can directly challenge power.

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