Reconceiving Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons as Transitional Justice Actors

Abstract

This paper will explore the idea of whether refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) could or should become actors in the transitional justice processes taking place in their country of origin. It seeks to engage with the question of how has the existence of numbers of people in prolonged internal displacement or refugee camps affected the resolution of the situations that forced them into displacement?

A useful point of entry to this discussion is the case study of the Timorese Truth Commission, which had a unique ‘reception’ function. There were some serious difficulties reconciling the desire to bring refugees from West Timor home, with the legal demands for exclusion screening of militia from the camps. There was a heavily gendered impact in that exercise that went largely unnoticed. There were also significant numbers of Timorese granted refuge in third countries since 1975. I argue that transitional justice processes where there has been significant displacement of the population must tailor their operation to reflect the needs of that population. This seems straight-forward but in fact has been extremely difficult in the Timorese context.

Keywords: Refugee law, transitional justice, Timor Leste, protracted displacement