Features

May 13, 2008

Linking Peace and Justice

The imperatives of peace and justice are often juxtaposed, as if they pose a choice between two mutually exclusive options. As the ICTJ increasingly works in contexts with varying degrees of conflict or transition, we are sometimes confronted by the notion that justice must either wait or be sacrificed entirely for peace.

The Center’s work has affirmed that both peace and justice may be pursued simultaneously, including in countries where a transition may not have occurred yet or where conditions remain precarious (continued below).

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A Closer Look: Northern Uganda

Over the past two years, ongoing peace talks and attempts to resolve the conflict in northern Uganda, coupled with the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) pursuit of top Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leaders, have made it a pivotal case study of the tensions between justice and peace. Since the ICC released arrest warrants in 2005, the talks have been framed partly by this dilemma. Although it is widely believed that the warrants themselves drew the LRA to the peace table after more than 20 years of waging a brutal campaign against the people of northern Uganda, the rebel leaders have threatened not to sign any peace deal until the indictments are dropped.

Outside the options of either prosecutions or blanket amnesty, a third way is being explored in the peace negotiations. According to the ICC’s complementarity principle, if a rigorous and serious national plan for accountability were established, the arrest warrants could be legitimately dropped without sacrificing either peace or justice. The ICTJ has given presentations to the parties at the peace talks detailing what these requirements could and should entail in order to uphold international legal standards. A strong push from Ugandan civil society—parts of which have advocated truth-seeking, reparations, and traditional conflict resolution—has also led the Center to survey public views of justice and peace in the hope of contributing to these discussions.

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The growing demand for our involvement at various stages of a peace process has expanded possibilities not only for how we engage, but also for the temporal mandate of our commitments. For example, in Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia, efforts to pursue justice—constrained by the need to maintain the existing fragile peace—demand a long-term vision based on capacity building by civil society. In countries where conflict is ongoing and justice may be “held hostage” to peace talks, we are challenged by the urgent imperative to cease hostilities. Recent developments in Afghanistan, Burundi, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, have required a delicate balancing act between peace and accountability. We have assisted by surveying victims’ needs and opinions; advocating against measures, such as blanket amnesties, that would enshrine impunity; or laying the groundwork for future transitional justice (TJ) activities by providing targeted information to all those participating in peace talks.

The need for more comparative information and conceptual clarity on these complex dynamics—coupled with a growing demand for technical assistance to mediators and other peacemakers—motivated the ICTJ to launch a new Peace and Justice Program in 2007. The program will operate out of our Geneva office under the direction of ICTJ cofounder Priscilla Hayner, who spent several months last year researching peace negotiations in a number of countries, including Liberia and Sierra Leone. Results will be published in forthcoming months, detailing the interplay between TJ measures and several prominent transitions toward peace over the past decade.

Photo: Gulu, Uganda, August 2007. Young resident at Koch Goma Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp. Photo by Nisma Zaman/ICTJ.

"Linking Peace and Justice" was originally printed in the ICTJ Annual Report 2006/2007.