Helen Clapp
“Transitional justice is a polarized terrain – both in practice and in study.” Daniel Marin-Lopez, Kathryn Sikkink, and Patrick Vinck delved into the complications and contradictions inherent in the Colombia Truth Commission and the field of transitional justice more broadly during a panel hosted by the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School on Thursday, October 13. Moderated by HKS Professor Yanilda Gonzalez, the three panelists, all members of the Transitional Justice Evaluation Team (TJET), focused on the transitional justice experience in Colombia, whose truth commission released its final report “There is a Future if There is Truth” on June 28, 2022. Marin-Lopez served as an expert advisor to the truth commission on corporate complicity, and he shared the Commission’s process, findings, and recommendations. Vinck noted that according to the victims’ surveys he and his team conducted in Colombia in 2015, over 90% of survivors regard knowing the truth as an essential part of reparations. Sikkink tied the presentation together with an overview of TJET’s data and goals, remarking that the team has collected data on 94 truth commissions in 64 countries.
The diverse research foci and academic expertise of the four TJET Principal Investigators (PIs) create what Sikkink describes as productive tensions, allowing the team to approach their study of transitional justice from multiple perspectives. Two of the team’s four PIs focus on macro-level analysis of transitional justice mechanisms: Kathryn Sikkink and Geoff Dancy lead the collection and analysis of data about criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, and amnesties around the world. The other two PIs, Phuong Pham and Patrick Vinck, are concerned with understanding transitional justice at the micro-level. Pham and Vinck, who are based at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, design and conduct surveys of victims in transitional countries to learn about their perceptions of their countries’ judicial systems, their experiences of violence, and their attitudes towards transitional justice mechanisms, among other questions.
The challenge for the TJET team is to heed its own findings about what works in transitional justice while at the same time respecting victims’ opinions, which sometimes directly contradict what the evidence suggests. For example, while the team found that Colombia’s reparations program is the most ambitious and comprehensive of all existing governmental reparations programs, Colombian victims in Pham and Vinck’s surveys expressed that they were unhappy with the pace and scope of reparations. Similarly, while the Colombian Truth Commission has conducted over 30,000 interviews with victims, Marin-Lopez recounts that some protesters outside the Truth Commission’s headquarters expressed discontent with what they perceived as the Commission’s lack of dialogue with them. This is not to say that the victims are wrong. Transitional justice mechanisms, no matter how comprehensive, cannot possibly reflect the vast array of victims’ experiences, and subsets of the victimized population may have valid reason to feel that their experience has not been correctly or adequately reflected. As Vinck pointed out during the panel, even the most comprehensive transitional justice mechanisms (like the Colombian Truth Commission’s 9,000-page report) will inevitably fall short of addressing all victims’ needs.
The audience members picked up on the tensions inherent in transitional justice. One attendee highlighted that there is not always a clear distinction between victims and perpetrators, making the design and administration of transitional justice mechanisms difficult. Another attendee asked whether Colombia’s transitional justice mechanisms are adequate to address the systemic societal challenges facing the country, in addition to addressing victims’ needs. A third attendee asked whether and how the truth commission’s recommendations could be implemented. These questions probe some of the most important debates in the field: to whom are transitional justice mechanisms accountable? How do we know when and whether a mechanism has accomplished its goals? What balance should mechanisms strike between restorative and retributive justice? Where do we draw the line between transitional justice and addressing longstanding systemic issues within a society? The diverse strengths and experiences of the TJET members and the team’s dual focus on micro- and macro- level transitional justice put the team in a unique position to address the contradictions and tensions inherent in transitional societies – and in the academic field of transitional justice – head on.