Closing Impunity Gaps: Regional transitional justice processes?

Violence and human rights violations in putatively internal armed conflicts often involve significant cross-border dimensions. Yet the transitional justice mechanisms that respond to past atrocities have generally been undertaken in national or international institutions and focus primarily on offenses within a single state and primarily by national actors of that state. Despite the proliferation of transitional justice mechanisms, they have generally not been designed or utilized to address transboundary or regionalized abuses. The result has been significant inconsistencies in practice, with some crimes addressed and others ignored, creating zones of impunity. In this article, we explore the relative absence of regional transitional justice Transitional Justice Review, Vol.1, Iss.1, 2012, 3-30 1 The authors are grateful to Johanna Herman for her helpful comments. This paper was originally developed for a project organized by Kirsten Campbell of the University of London, Goldsmiths, on “A More Secure World? Humanitarian Law and the Prevention and Regulation of Contemporary Armed Conflict” with a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. The authors would like to thank Dr. Campbell and the participants in a conference for the project for their comments. Any errors are of course ours alone. 1 Ross and Sriram: Closing Impunity Gaps Published by Scholarship@Western, 2013 Amy Ross and Chandra Lekha Sriram 4 Transitional Justice Review, Vol.1, Iss.1, 2012, 3-30 mechanisms, and consider how regional approaches have been used to promote conflict resolution and might be used to shape accountability processes as well. Drawing on the experiences of Central America and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we argue that the potential for regional approaches is as yet untested but merits closer consideration.