The Facts of Transitional Justice

Abstract

The field of transitional justice encompasses a variety of mechanisms that seek to advance an impressive number of ends. These mechanisms differ from one another in significant ways, yet at the core of each is the need for truth. Moreover, because truth is a core goal of every transitional justice mechanism, fact-finding is a core function. But in no realm is fact-finding both more crucial and more challenging than in the realm of transitional justice. Accurate fact-finding is hard to achieve in times of peace and stability. Its accomplishment following cataclysms of war, ethnic strife, or large-scale human rights violations is all the more difficult. This chapter will explore those challenges and detail some of the distortions they have wrought. It begins by explicating various typologies of transitional justice facts because it is only when we categorize and understand the various kinds of facts that transitional justice mechanisms must unearth, consolidate, analyze, and communicate that we see the different functions they serve and the different methods that must be utilized to find them. The chapter then explores a number of the obstacles that transitional justice mechanisms confront in finding accurate facts; it concludes with a discussion of one obstacle that substantially distorts fact-finding across all times, places, and mechanisms;: namely, political interference.

Keywords: Evidence, fact-finding, international criminal law, transitional justice