Foreword

Summary

This book adds new dimensions to current transitional justice models. The title correctly suggests that in post-conflict situations there is no one agenda for coming to terms with large-scale past abuses but that a variety of ways and means commend themselves for rendering justice and rebuilding societies. The contributors to this volume offer perspectives which link the transitional justice debate to the structural causes of violence and conflict. Their chapters reveal a wide span of human compassion and expand transitional agendas to include the exigencies of justice for past, present and future generations. In fact, these agendas addressing large-scale patterns of injustice, discrimination, repression, exploitation and acts of brutality are essentially the core of a comprehensive human rights agenda.

In many conflict situations acts of violence causing human suffering affect and victimise most severely the vulnerable and marginalised sectors of society. It is widely recognised and expressed with serious concern by the United Nations Security Council that in particular women and children account for a large proportion of those adversely affected by armed conflict, and that in such situations sexual violence and rape are rampant. Similarly the recently adopted United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) recalls with deep concern that indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of the colonisation and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources. This book analyses and discusses the plight of vulnerable people who have endured a state of exclusion and discrimination for centuries. It asserts that transitional agendas should also tackle the root causes of exclusion and discrimination, render social and political justice, and foster processes of equality and participation with the goal of eradicating for good patterns and policies of exclusion and discrimination.

The normative basis for transitional agendas was in its essence already embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which was proclaimed as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. Subsequent legal instruments strengthened the edifice of human dignity and justice with special concern for the disadvantaged, the disabled, the excluded and the victims of gross human rights violations.