Transitional Justice as Recognition: An Analysis of the Women’s Court in Sarajevo

Abstract

In May 2015, a Women's Court was held in Sarajevo over a four-day period. It was the first such court on European soil for more than 40 years and reflected a growing awareness within the former Yugoslavia of the limitations of criminal trials, both international and national. The author attended the Women's Court, and this article draws on both her experiences as a participant observer and her interviews with some of the organizers and witnesses. While it is too soon to know whether the Court will produce any substantive results or have any lasting impact, this article seeks to offer an early analysis. While the organizers of the Court theorized it as feminist justice, this article regards feminist justice as part of what Haldemann terms 'justice as recognition'. Analyzing and assessing the Court within this conceptual framework, it argues that the Court successfully delivered justice as recognition at a symbolic level. The challenge now is how to translate this symbolic justice as recognition into a more tangible and practical form.

Examining Male Wartime Rape Survivors’ Perspectives on Justice in Northern Uganda

“…Feminist legal scholar Ní Aoláin emphasizes that recognition as a notion of justice is essentially individual-centred and constitutes an essential component of redress that ‘encourages us to look beyond law to a wider set of social and psychological processes’ (2012: 22). By asking how justice and injustice are perceived from the perspective of victims, such an approach to justice entails ‘a broader, more critical and sensitive outlook’ (Haldemann, 2009: 678) and qualifies as a ‘counter-balance to the perpetrator-centric focus of criminal courts’ (Clark, 2016: 69) that is quintessentially more victim-centric. From a gender perspective, a recognition-theoretical conception of justice likewise enables us to ‘acknowledge the complexity of harms that compromise women’s devalued social context’ (Ní Aoláin, 2012: 22–23), as well as a variety of other gendered harms, as experienced by both women and men, which are often made invisible by binary legal analyses.…”

‘Victims of’ human rights abuses in transitional justice: hierarchies, perpetrators and the struggle for peace

“…They have sought to dispel the 'meta woman experience' myth often seen in international legal processes where women are couched as victims and encouraged to testify in accordance with a dominant script of sexual violence. 110 To this end, an innovative project in the former Yugoslavia set up a Woman's Court in Sarajevo with the purpose of giving voice to women who had been victimised in the region by allowing them to tell of their experiences of gendered harms to a collective audience. The project is driven by the desire to provide justice as recognition to women there who had felt let down by the formal criminal justice process that was only interested in the formal legal value of their testimony and not in the ripple effect their victimisation had on them, their families and communities.…”

Transitional justice as social control: political transitions, human rights norms and the reclassification of the past

“…In the USA, a non‐official truth commission was established in Greensboro, North Carolina, to examine the legacy of racism and violence in the area (Williams ), while in post‐conflict Northern Ireland, a Catholic community concerned by the official efforts’ focus on IRA violence and the neglect of victims of state violence, established its own unofficial localized documentation initiative focusing on the latter (Lundy and McGovern ). Other modes of informal truth‐seeking mechanisms involve the establishment of informal ‘courts’, especially ‘women's courts’, which focus on addressing neglected abuses against women, for example in the war in Bosnia (Clark ). Such ‘courts’ lack legal powers but, at least in some circumstances, are endowed with moral authority and able to vindicate victims and generate moral condemnation of previously unacknowledged human rights violations (Chinkin ).…”