Transitional Justice
What is Transitional Justice?
Transitional justice describes a range of judicial and non-judicial strategies used to deal with a legacy of human rights abuses and armed conflict in a given country. These strategies have a variety of goals: to hold those who had command responsibility for systematic abuses legally accountable; to help repair social divisions caused by conflict; to provide survivors with a full accounting and acknowledgement of the abuses that occurred; to offer material and moral reparations to survivors; and to reform key state institutions including the military, police and judiciary in order to ensure that the pattern of human rights violations is not repeated.Our Transitional Justice Work
CJA works directly with foreign governments on a variety of transitional justice initiatives. We work alongside in-country prosecutors to hold human rights abusers criminally accountable in national courts - especially where defendants in CJA’s UJ cases have been deported or extradited to stand trial in the home country. CJA attorneys provide expertise on witness preparation and testimony, the introduction of evidence, charging human rights crimes and other areas of human rights prosecutions. We also organize trainings that bring together faculties of judges, prosecutors, investigators and forensic anthropologists with strong track records in national court human rights prosecutions. The focus of our training work is on imparting the practical “how to” specifics of bringing successful national court prosecutions and focusing on the actual, day to day obstacles prosecutors and NGO lawyers face in fighting impunity.
