When are Truth & Reconciliation Commissions Useful?
July 30th, 2008 • Africa, Conflict, Law
Ilmi Granoff made an excellent comment on a recent Opinio Juris post on the United States and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. An excerpt is below:
Truth and reconciliation commissions are most appropriate where the nature of available evidence, or the institutional capacity to process such evidence, is not adequate for traditional prosecution. When the crime is widespread and institutionalized – apartheid in South Africa or genocide in Rwanda — it can overwhelm a court system with cases and, at the same time, underwhelm a court system with reliable evidence on which to convict the accused. Courts do not function well when half of your population may have committed crimes. How does Rwanda begin the process of rebuilding if for next half-century it is prosecuting to the last man with a machete? Courts also do not function well when there is no evidence to feed into the system. It is simply in the nature of certain crimes that they yield little evidence; consider, for example, an apartheid-era South African police officer who stormed into a shantytown at night ten years earlier to beat a victim who would be the only witness to his beating.
Of course in Rwanda the recourse to gacaca to try the vast majority of accused is a somewhat troubling development. One article I read estimated that up to 1 million people will be tried by the gacaca courts, in a country with a population of approximately 8 million! How can a society operate when one-eight of it’s members are being prosecuted for crimes?
These issues of post-conflict justice and reconstruction are at the heart of what interests me about international law. How does a society and country continue after a genocide or an Apartheid? How can the law help or hinder reconciliation and development? Trials or Truth Commissions? Penalties or apologies?
I am certainly swayed by the very strong arguments in favour of judicial responses, such as seen in Rwanda, but still think that is room for more reconciliatory and history writing institutions.
Whichever option is selected will always have its critics – depending on who you read the South Africans hate the TRC, and the Rwandans couldn’t care less about the ICTR – so what’s the middle ground?
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