Evidence from the Transitional Justice Data Base reveals which transitional justice mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms positively or negatively affect human rights and democracy. This article demonstrates that specific combinations of mechanisms—trials and amnesties; and trials, amnesties, and truth commissions—generate improvements in those two political goals. The findings support a justice balance approach to transitional justice: trials provide accountability and amnesties provide stability, advancing democracy and respect for human rights. The project further illustrates that, all else being equal, truth commissions alone have a negative impact on the two political objectives, but contribute positively when combined with trials and amnesty.
The chapter develops the theoretical framework guiding the volume. That framework adapts the notion of an Archimedes’ Lever: that even weak actors (victims of business and human rights abuses in the Global South) with effective tools (institutional innovation) and the fulcrum in the right position (contexts favouring corporate human rights accountability), can lift up heavy weights (human rights accountability for economic actors' abuses) from under opposing forces (veto players in the business community and their allies). This ‘from below’ process challenges two existing frameworks. It first questions whether the transitional justice focus on the importance of international pressure is useful when such pressure has been very weak with regard to corporate accountability for past human rights abuses. It secondly disputes the business and human rights 'bottom up' approach that advances foreign courts in the Global North as the protagonists of corporate human rights accountability when the dynamism resides in Global South courts. The chapter introduces the set of factors that have led to corporate accountability in the world and the obstacles that have prevented it.
Most studies of truth commissions assert their positive role in improving human rights. A first wave of research made these claims based on qualitative analysis of a single truth commission or a small number of cases. Thirty years of experience with truth commissions and dozens of examples allow cross-national statistical studies to assess these findings. Two recent studies undertake that project. Their findings, which are summarized in this article, challenge the prevailing view that truth commissions foster human rights, showing instead that commissions, when used alone, tend to have a negative impact on human rights. Truth commissions have a positive impact, however, when used in combination with trials and amnesties. This article extends the question of whether truth commissions improve human rights to how, when and why they succeed or fail in doing so. It presents a 'justice balance' explanation, whereby commissions, incapable of promoting stability and accountability on their own, contribute to human rights improvements when they complement and enhance amnesties and prosecutions. The article draws on experiences in Brazil, Chile, Nepal, South Korea and South Africa to illustrate the central argument.
This article presents a new dataset of transitional justice mechanisms utilized worldwide from . These data complement the growing body of quantitative and comparative analyses of transitional justice. This article summarizes three important contributions made by the dataset. First, it includes five transitional justice mechanisms (trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration policies), allowing scholars to avoid many of the methodological errors committed by performing single-mechanism studies. Second, it provides an expanded sample, both temporally and geographically, to facilitate greater comparative and policy impact. Third, the dataset enables scholars to analyze transitional justice across a variety of political contexts, including democratic transitions and civil wars. These data illuminate a new set of general trends and patterns in the implementation of transitional justice worldwide. The findings show that countries adopt amnesties more often than other mechanisms. They predominantly grant them in the context of civil war and to opponents of the state, rather than state agents. Courts rarely prosecute those currently in power for human rights violations. In civil war settings, rebels, rather than state actors, face trials. In post-authoritarian settings, courts try former authoritarian actors, but do not address crimes committed by the opposition to authoritarian rule. The dataset also reveals regional patterns of mechanism usage. Trials, lustration policies, and reparations occur most often in Europe. Non-European countries more frequently adopt truth commissions and amnesties than do their European counterparts, with a particularly high number of amnesties granted in Latin America.
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