Key Lessons

Civil Society Engagement and Local Ownership Is Essential

GIJTR’s work over the past decade facilitating community-based truth and justice initiatives reinforces this publication’s primary recommendation, which is that governments and international partners should invest in and holistically engage local communities when designing and implementing transitional justice mechanisms.

If GIJTR’s work confirms one fact, it is that local communities know best what they need. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to conflict transformation. Context is everything. While the findings in this report are many, they all support the concept that building the capacity of local agents to foster truth through memory, justice and education increases the likelihood that recurrence of violence can be avoided and peaceful, more equitable futures can take hold. In order for this approach to be successful, however, certain criteria must be met.

Inclusivity Must Be Prioritized

In countries coming to terms with violent pasts, peace cannot take hold unless all members of society—especially marginalized groups such as women, ethnic and religious minorities and survivors—play a central role in rebuilding. To date, however, many transitional justice models have failed to engage in a meaningful way with these key voices, preferring instead top-down procedures that prioritize the experiences and opinions of those in power. As this report details, this approach can often lead to the proliferation of simplistic, “official” narratives that can be present in a multitude of harmful ways, including in biased educational material that silences the experiences of many in order to benefit the few. After conflict or amidst a repressive regime, public trust in a country’s justice system is almost always at an all-time low. When not approached in an inclusive, holistic manner, transitional justice models miss the vital opportunity to begin the long but necessary road to rebuilding this trust. Building the capacity of CSOs and survivors groups, who are generally far more trusted in their communities than international actors or the political elite, can be a vital component of this strategy. When political will for transitional justice is low, or when “truth processes” are set up by governments that never intend to support them, locally led organizations can step in to provide vital, safe spaces for survivors and victims not only to process their past at individual and collective levels but also to articulate and effectively advocate for their collective hopes for the future. No single truth is likely to emerge from these efforts, but in fact, that should not be the goal. Embracing multiple truths—the notion that many things can be true at once—can be a powerful way to foster empathy, identify shared values and shape policy change.

To advance these objectives, national and international actors must be intentional and steadfast in their pursuit of inclusivity, as even good-faith attempts to reach marginalized communities may not yield immediate results. As one example, despite initial efforts made by The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), 2017–2021, to engage women in their hearings, its structure was largely not conducive to women’s engagement for various reasons, including that many women’s domestic obligations made it difficult for them to access the commission. Halfway through the TRRC’s mandate, only 51 of the 188 witnesses who testified before the commission were women, despite the magnitude of their suffering under Yahya Jammeh’s regime.[vii] In order to ensure that women’s narratives and expectations did not go unheard, GIJTR partner Women in Liberation and Leadership (WILL) led small-scale listening circles throughout rural Gambia, with a flexible methodology that was reliant on local capacity and served as a platform for women and hard-to-reach communities (including LGBTQIA+ persons) to share their experiences and receive psychosocial support. Furthermore, WILL communicated to the TRRC how the women’s obstacles to testifying could be overcome. As a result, the TRRC offered to provide free transportation and food for the survivors’ travel to and from the nearest the TRRC hearings in order for them to take part.

Informal Truth Initiatives Have Tremendous Value

The Gambian context provides insight into another of the key learnings in this report: namely, that multiple avenues can and should be used to improve access to truth in conflict and post-conflict settings. Many women who testified via the TRRC’s televised hearings faced intense public backlash and shaming, as did their family members. In contrast with the TRRC’s monolithic procedures that could have potentially exposed individual survivors to shame and stigma, WILL’s listening circles served as a community-based approach to identifying the varying experiences and needs of women in the transitional justice process. As WILL’s founder and CEO, Fatou Baldeh, has explained:

Even when the TRRC ended, we continued to hold informal hearings. We created spaces where these victims could come together and create peer to peer support. For many women, they were more comfortable sharing their stories behind closed doors, where someone listened to them and acknowledged what happened to them. I think victims, especially women, should be given these options. For some people, they want to access formal structures and those people should be supported because it is important that the experiences of women are documented. But for others who feel that they don’t want access to those structures, I think it is important that they are provided with informal structures, where they can share what happened to them and what they are expecting moving forward.[viii]

More intimate, safe spaces to share experiences not only offer the emotional support that survivors need in order to heal and move forward, but can also be instrumental in achieving justice as part of documentation and accountability efforts. Many initiatives model this approach, including in Colombia where GIJTR worked alongside CSOs in marginalized communities to undertake truth-telling projects about the country’s civil war. “These truth-telling workshops were really quite unique,” explains Darío Colmenares Millán, a program director with GIJTR who helped facilitate the projects. “As opposed to historical memory, which gives a broader overview of history, truth-telling is more factual, personal and precise. It is about helping individuals dig out the truth, which not only helps validate their individual stories, but is very helpful in verifying facts related to human rights abuses.”[ix]

In contexts with robust national transitional justice processes such as Colombia, these informal processes help ensure that as many people as possible share their experiences. “However well-intentioned the Truth Commission is—and I truly believe it is—it cannot include the reports of hundreds of thousands of people or anywhere near that,” notes Colmenares Millán. In less-secure settings, such as Sudan and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, CSOs can provide a valuable bridge to formal accountability mechanisms. Formal transitional justice processes can take years to coalesce, but informal processes can ensure the path to justice is not entirely dormant in the meantime. With this goal in mind, GIJTR partners in both of these contexts are training local documenters to meet international standards so that the testimonies they collect now can be used in future accountability initiatives.

A Holistic Blend of Formal and Informal Processes Is Most Effective

The final lesson learned from the thematic and country reports is that perpetuating a traditional binary of formal or informal transitional justice mechanisms is not helpful in practice. Survivors and victims of conflict are much better served by an interdisciplinary approach to conflict transformation that offers multiple avenues for truth-telling, justice, healing and peace. This approach can serve as a sort of “checks and balances” when formal routes to preserving memory and pursuing justice exist only on paper but not in practice (such as in Venezuela) and in contexts such as Mexico where governments might promote “softer” memory initiatives in lieu of pursuing justice and accountability. In the latter case, as detailed in this report, CSOs, informal collectives and families of the disappeared can step into the role of justice actors themselves. In searches for the missing and disappeared in Mexico, for example, women often take on the heaviest burden of work: acting as advocates, compiling dossiers and even excavating burial sites as the government stalls on these efforts.[2]

In settings where cooperation between informal and formal initiatives is possible, national and international actors can serve as conduits between communities and states by advocating for inclusive, survivor-based approaches to formal transitional justice mechanisms. In Colombia, The Gambia and elsewhere, GIJTR has advised truth commissioners on tools for collecting, documenting and sharing the stories of survivors who are based in rural communities and other difficult-to-access locations that would otherwise prevent their inclusion in the commission’s activities. Further, this effort helps to build local trust in formal processes, positioning civil society to support the findings of truth commissions and implementation of recommendations. For instance, a local GIJTR partner in The Gambia created a child-friendly version of the TRRC’s final report with the goal of engaging Gambian youth in supporting the peace process. In other contexts, such as Guinea, GIJTR has facilitated workshops with journalists and religious leaders on transitional justice, dialogue and advocacy, with the goal of creating more effective channels for survivor communities far and wide to engage in both informal and formal mechanisms.

Conclusion and Key Recommendations

By addressing the silencing of victims and the manipulation of history that often accompany conflict and its end, GIJTR seeks to emphasize that securing the right to truth should be a non-negotiable in any setting, and particularly so in transitions from a culture of violence and impunity to one grounded in justice and peace. The ability to tell one’s story freely, to establish the events that resulted in human rights violations, to know what happened to disappeared loved ones, to achieve accountability for harms done, to openly memorialize and mourn all that was lost and to educate the public, including future generations, about past crimes are all essential components of peace-building and violence prevention.

This State of Truth Report serves to support civil society leaders, national and international advocates and policy makers, funders, practitioners and educators of transitional justice and related fields by directing their attention not only to the importance of truth in conflict settings but also to three key elements that are crucial to its development and safeguarding: memory, justice and education. When the right to remember past violations, hold perpetrators accountable and preserve lessons learned for future generations is lacking, truth remains silenced and peace cannot take hold. The contexts and methodologies examined in this report serve as a roadmap for stakeholders navigating complex conflict and post-conflict terrains, providing concrete strategies that are flexible and replicable. Through detailed thematic reports as well as country reports, the State of Truth Report can also function as a guide for anyone seeking up-to-date information on these issues to support their own work.

In acknowledging the tension that has long existed between formal and informal transitional justice processes that center around truth-telling, this report highlights effective methodologies for utilizing both types of mechanisms in order to meet the diverse needs of conflict survivors. In doing so, the publication reveals how, through new coalitions, new online mediums and new community-led initiatives, a grassroots movement for truth and justice is taking shape—largely in the global South—that has great potential to counter the silencing of victims and bring an end to recurring cycles of violence. This movement is showing that, rather than perpetuating methods used by many of the traditional actors in this space who have long promoted a top-down, binary approach to truth and justice, lasting peace must be developed through extensive community engagement, be inclusive of all who were previously marginalized and respect the unique needs and vision of local communities.

These overarching recommendations are drawn from the report’s findings and, when considered alongside the specific country recommendations in the chapters that follow, can serve as a framework for anyone wishing to develop the practices that help propel this new movement forward:

Civil Society Actors

●      Build local and national coalitions to increase the impact of advocacy initiatives and to ensure inclusion of the greatest number of affected communities.

●      Engage in outreach, education and consultation alongside local stakeholders, religious leaders and trusted community leaders with the aim of developing common principles to guide future truth, memory and justice processes.

●      Identify opportunities to ensure inclusion of rural and other hard-to-reach communities in memory and memorialization activities.

●      Seek out and mitigate barriers to participation in truth, memory, and justice processes for marginalized groups such as women, youth, Indigenous or minority communities, elders, people with disabilities and those with literacy limitations.

●      Mitigate the tensions between peace and justice priorities by focusing on complementarity, sequencing and timing of activities.

International Partners

●      Engage in continuous diplomatic, legal and programmatic efforts to ensure a safe environment for human rights defenders, media workers and civil society activists.

●      Ensure locally appropriate and gender-sensitive psychosocial care for documenters and archivists is integrated into programs that support documentation of human rights violations.

●      Advocate with both governments and civil society to consult extensively with local stakeholders—including religious, traditional and informal community leaders—about truth-seeking, memory and accountability needs at every stage of the design and implementation of truth, memory and justice efforts.

●      Consider how best to incorporate traditional justice and reconciliation mechanisms into truth-seeking and accountability practices.

●      Develop funding strategies that ensure local community-based organizations are direct, primary beneficiaries.