Truth-Seeking and Legal Accountability

• In Event: The Politics of Memory Activism

Abstract

While “dealing with the past” has become a collective expectation for states, there is no consensus over whether this expectation constitutes a single transitional justice norm or multiple norms, and there is equal disagreement about the origins of these expectations. To address this disagreement, this paper traces changes over time in the strengths of two related transitional justice principles: the principle of legal accountability and the principle of truth-seeking. To do so, the paper employs two measures of norm strength: concordance, which is the degree to which international actors and institutions refer to, accept, and signal agreement with the ideas associated with a norm; and institutionalization, which is the degree to which these ideas are codified and ensconced in international treaties and law. The analysis demonstrates that these two transitional justice norms are distinct, having emerged at different times and via distinct processes. While the principle of legal accountability became a norm in the early 1990s and is today a strong norm, the principle of truth-seeking became a norm later and remains a relatively weak norm.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Dixon, Villanova University

• Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Suffolk University