Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights
Transitional Justice and Law
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.