 |
Chapter four in the Transitional Justice in the Middle East and North Africa Working Group Summary Report is written by S-CAR PhD Ibrahim Fraihat.
The protests that swept across parts of the Middle East beginning in December 2010 have had a dramatic impact on the political and social landscapes of the region. Rulers once thought largely immovable, from Tunisia’s President Ben Ali to Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Qaddafi, were unceremoniously ousted all within a matter of months of each other. To date, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen have seen their strongmen leaders removed, an ongoing civil war has engulfed Syria, conflict and violence have shaken Bahrain, and other countries in the region have experienced various levels of instability and expressions of public outrage.
While regimes may have fallen and authoritarian leaders deposed, these Middle Eastern countries are
still undergoing processes of political transition and social change. What political formation ultimately emerges in each state will depend on its specific context and according to its own timetable. Whether new systems and structures of governance are profoundly different from those they replaced remains to be seen. However, what can be said with some assurance is that, region-wide, a common theme undergirding all of these struggles and the mass public protests that epitomize them has been the notion of citizens’ rights to justice and dignity.
Societies that are in processes of transition from earlier systems of governance to new ones—particularly those that have overthrown one form of authoritarian rule—often contend with the thorny issue of reconciling with their past before they can effectively construct a new future. Experiences in other parts of the world where political movements have ousted dictatorships demonstrate that in order to build durable peace in post-conflict situations, citizens must be confident that there are legitimate structures that redress past grievances. The idea that the administration of justice during a period of political transition is critical to peace-building, referred to broadly as “transitional justice,” emerged in the post-World War II era but gained significant momentum from the 1980s onwards.
Transitional justice encompasses the range of policies, practices, and mechanisms, both judicial and non-judicial, that post-conflict countries implement in order to reconcile with the legacy of their “evil” pasts, to address residual social and political grievances, reconstruct the state-citizen relationship, and ensure that emerging political processes have requisite legitimacy and public support. Amid a host of areas of engagement, the core functions of a transitional justice system are to end any ongoing human rights violations and prevent future ones, investigate past abuses, provide redress to victims and ensure that perpetrators are penalized, and create mechanisms for ensuring a durable peace through supporting national reconciliation. Explicit means by which transitional justice is implemented include trials and reparations, reinvigoration of the rule of law, establishment of truth and reconciliation tribunals, and institutional reform, particularly of the security sector.
Transitional justice has received significant scholarly attention in many other parts of the world, focusing
on authoritarian regimes moving toward democracy, and there is a rich body of literature on the topic. While there has been limited academic exploration of transitional justice in relation to the Middle East, recent events have reinvigorated interest in the topic. Social, economic, and political justice were key themes raised by protestors during the uprisings across the Middle East. Several Middle Eastern countries have placed the issue on their national agendas, and have launched transitional justice mechanisms, consultation processes, and assorted areas of engagement. An examination of transitional justice within the context of the Middle East is both timely and necessary, and can contribute significantly to the existing body of scholarship on the subject.
In line with this, CIRS launched a multi-disciplinary research initiative to examine unfolding experiences
of transitional justice across the Middle East in the post-uprising era, with original research chapters published in an edited volume titled,Transitional Justice in the Middle East (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2016).