Colouring by Numbers: The Effects of Legalism on the Transitional Justice Practice

• In Event: Actors of transitional justice: Beyond the victim – perpetrator binary 2

Abstract

Taking a victim-centred perspective to reparations, this paper explores the schism between rights and needs in the transitional justice discourse and practice. Despite the aim of transitional justice to fulfil a moral duty towards victims and serve as remedy for their injuries, the legalism which underlies it ultimately means that the practice of transitional justice fails victims. This paper argues that as transitional justice moved from bottom-up demands made by victims to government policy and finally to global project, it underwent a process of legal standardization which ended up limiting the access of victims to measures of reparations both in terms of scope and numbers. First, as human rights violations often entail assaults on entrenched context-specific cultural practices, victims suffer harms that are not easily translatable into the universalising language of international law. Second, these harms, in turn, give rise to needs that go beyond a narrow legal understanding of reparations. Third, even when reparations should have a wider reach as is the case with such administrative reparations programmes like the ones in Peru, Guatemala and Colombia, the bureaucracy of these programmes gives preferential treatment to certain victims with legal and political know-how, further disengaging transitional justice practice from the needs of victims. As law practitioners translate victims’ needs into rights, they effectively tell victims what they can get and who can get it. This paper contends that transitional justice needs a victimology based on needs, where the practice of reparations builds on a context-specific understanding of redress.

Author

• Adriana Rudling