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Over the last fifteen years, the South African postapartheid Transitional Amnesty Process – implemented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators from around the world and from almost every discipline of human sciences. Lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists as well as political scientists have tried to understand, describe and comment on the ‘shocking’ South African political decision to give amnesty to all who fully disclosed their politically motivated crimes committed during the apartheid era. Investigating the postapartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the postapartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems. Both processes contain mechanisms that encourage the constitution of the unity of the political body while ensuring future solidity and stability. From this perspective, the book deals with the importance of several concepts such as truth about the past, publicly shared memory, unity of the political body and public confession.
This volume offers the first dedicated scholarly comparison of Colombia and South Africa in relation to the intersecting ideas of transitional justice, distributive justice, and transformative constitutionalism.
This book explores the complicated relationship between constitutions and transitional justice. It brings together scholars and practitioners from different countries to analyze the indispensable role of constitutions and constitutional courts in the process of overcoming political injustice of the past. Issues raised in the book include the role of a new constitution for the successful practice of transitional justice after democratization, revolution or civil war, and the difficulties faced by the court while dealing with mass human rights infringements with limited legal tools. The work also examines whether constitutionalizing transitional justice is a better strategy for new democracies in response to political injustice from the past. It further addresses the complex issue of backslides of democracy and consequences of constitutionalizing transitional justice. The group of international authors address the interplay of the constitution/court and transitional justice in their native countries, along with theoretical underpinnings of the success or unfulfilled promises of transitional justice from a comparative perspective. The book will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Transitional Justice, Comparative Constitutional Law, Human Rights Studies, International Criminal Law, Genocide Studies, Law and Politics, and Legal History.
The Era of Transitional Justice explores a broad set of issues raised by political transition and transitional justice through the prism of the South African TRC. South Africa constitutes a powerful case study of the enduring structural legacies of a troubled past, and of both the potential and limitations of transitional justice and human rights as agents of transformation in the contemporary era. South Africa‘s story has wider relevance because it helped to launch constitutional human rights and transitional justice as global discourses; as such, its own legacy is to some extent writ large in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts across the world. Based on a decade of research, and in an analysis that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, Paul Gready maintains that transitional justice needs to do more to address structural violence and in particular poverty, inequality and social and criminal violence as these have emerged as stubborn legacies from an oppressive or war-torn past in many parts of the world. Organised around four central themes new keyword conceptualisation (truth, justice, reconciliation); re-imagining human rights; engaging with the past and present; remaking the public sphere it is an argument that will be of considerable relevance to those interested in the law and politics of transitional societies.
In this book, 15 contributors from the disciplines of law, politics, and sociology reflect on South Africa's transition to democracy and the challenges of transformation and nation-building that have confronted the country since the first democratic elections of 1994. The range of topics is expansive, in keeping with a broader-than-usual definition of transitional justice which, it is argued, is more appropriate for States faced with the mammoth tasks of reform and institution-building in a context in which democracy has never been firmly rooted and the existence of widespread poverty gives rise to the dual demands for both bread and freedom. In the case of South Africa, the post-apartheid era has been characterized by wide-ranging attempts at transformation and nation-building, from the well-known Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reforms in education and policing, the promotion of women's rights, the reform of land law, the provision of basic services to hundreds of thousands of poor households, a new framework for freedom of expression, and the transformation of the judiciary. In the light of South Africa's commitment to a new constitutional dispensation and to legal regulation, this volume focuses in particular, but not exclusively, on the role that law and lawyers have played in social and political change in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. It sets the South African experience in historical and comparative perspective and considers whether any lessons may be learned for the field of transitional justice. (Series: Transitional Justice - Vol. 15)
This book is a compilation of twenty essays prepared for the occasion of the XIII Academic Conference of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia, held in Bogota in January 2019. Gathering some of the most prominent authors in constitutionalism and legal theory, the chapters critically examine classical debates, such as the role of judicial review in a democracy, the enforcement of socio-economic rights, the doctrine of unconstitutional amendments, the use of international and foreign precedents by national Courts, and the theory of transitional justice. The book opens a dialogue between philosophers and empirical researchers, building bridges between 'Global North' and 'Global South' approaches to constitutionalism. As such, it is an invitation to reengage with the classical debates on constitutionalism whilst also providing fresh insights into the future of this discipline.
The anthology presents the lectures given on the symposium »From Dictatorship to democracy« at the House of the Wannsee Conference on 13–14 September 2021. The aim of the organizers was to show what problems existed during the transition from dictatorship to democracy in several countries around the world. They all enacted laws or other measures to ensure that fundamental rights and the rule of law would resist anti-democratic ideologies, anti-Semitism, racism, and war crimes in the future. However, the legal system and law in these countries themselves often had their origins in dictatorship. Thus, there were and are obvious and hidden anti-democratic continuities that influence law and the legal system up to the present. Scientifics and jurists from Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, South Africa, and Germany examine these continuities in their contributions.
Reconciliation - Ubuntu - Peace processes - Reparation - Restorative justice - Amnesty - Memory - Testimony - Transitional justice - Genocide - The international criminal court - Truth commissions - Traditional and customary law - Human rights - Rights and reconciliation - Economic transformation - National truth commissions - Online resources on transitional.