| After a period of brutal conflict, a country and its people must move on from the violence and recover. To do so, post-conflict countries will often look back to identify the root causes of the violence, provide justice for victims, and generate ways to prevent future human rights abuses. Often, this is a difficult transition that involves a wide range of stakeholders and takes years to accomplish. Increasingly, human rights organizations and other groups have devoted themselves to the area of transitional justice, and in their efforts, have developed a number of effective mechanisms to address past crimes. Transitional justice is the process by which nations address past abuses and reform their society. Often, countries find it important to incorporate a number of different transitional justice mechanisms. The complex nature of human rights crises prove that dealing with only one factor of the past abuses will not bring about a peaceful transition or justice to the victims. Rather, a multitude of factors must be addressed.
There are many mechanisms that have been used throughout the world to bring about reform. Some of the most common transitional justice mechanisms have been to:
Certain mechanisms and combinations of tactics are more effective in some countries than in others, depending on whether their history involved civil or international war, or a brutal leadership that tortured the population. Each country's experience with human rights abuses is different and its cultural context also causes variation in the transitional tactics employed.
For more information about truth commissions, please visit the U.S. Institute for Peace's Truth Commissions Digital Collection. | 
