This dissertation project develops a theoretical understanding of how truth commissions achieve legitimacy and thus contribute to peace and stability in the aftermath of major traumatic events (e.g. civil war, mass killings, regime changes). I identify three components of truth commission legitimacy---authority, fairness, and transparency---that facilitate beneficial outcomes for societies emerging from a period of severe human rights repression or civil war. I theorize and test how institutions with these legitimacy characteristics contribute to an increase in respect for human rights and decrease political violence in transitioning societies, thus contributing to peace and stability. In order to test the hypothesized relationships, I create a truth commission characteristic dataset that provides greater detail than existing datasets. This project is a contribution to our understanding of the relationships between human rights, institutions, conflict, and international law. It provides one explanation for the inconsistent findings of extant work concerning the impact of transitional justice, generally and truth commissions, specifically. I provide evidence that there are identifiable "best practices" that truth commissions should consider adopting. This information can assist states, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations alike in making difficult decisions regarding the transitional justice process, which is expensive and time consuming further necessitating an understanding of what practices are most crucial for achieving peace and stability.

LL.M. (International Law) / The after-effects of the Second World War (WWII) and the Cold War that followed engendered a radical paradigm shift in the collective accountability for international crimes. Indeed, institutions have been established to take stock of the catastrophic effects of wars and enable states to come to terms with their confrontational past. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials mainly focused on reigning in military leaders who perpetrated mass killings. These trials laid the foundation for a reconfiguration of the international criminal justice. This study argues that the complementarity principle in the classical sense and the prosecutorial strategy of the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of only bringing to justice high-level perpetrators effectively creates an impunity gap if states are unwilling and unable to prosecute. Therefore, positive complementarity becomes necessary for the ICC to encourage states to prosecute both high and low-level perpetrators. In an endeavour to achieve this, TJ mechanisms become necessary as they provide a holistic approach, i.e. involvement of victims, provision of reparations and prosecution of offenders. The statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome statute) is said to have a so-called “catalysing effect” on domestic criminal justice systems by some authors mainly because the principal obligation to investigate and prosecute international crimes is entrusted to the domestic criminal justice systems. The ICC may exercise its prerogative over a case only if the states have not genuinely investigated or prosecuted the perpetrator. However, the catalysing effect of the complementarity principle can be discordant with transitional justice (TJ) mechanisms in post-conflict societies where justice might have to be compromised over peace and vice versa. This has been observed where measures such as amnesty, the use of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), and pardons have been solicited by rebels or de facto holders of power, such as military chiefs, as a way of evading accountability.

A pesquisa tem dois objetivos centrais: reconstruir o desenvolvimento da justiça de transição no Brasil até os dias atuais e identificar algumas das principais razões dos limites de sua implementação no país. Conforme as principais hipóteses, os limites da experiência da justiça transicional no Brasil estão associados a um discurso sobre a redemocratização no país, discurso este que tem a conciliação nacional como sua principal categoria. A primeira hipótese da pesquisa é a de que o discurso da conciliação nacional, veiculado pelo menos desde a elaboração do projeto de anistia pelo governo Figueiredo, continuaria a ser um dos principais limites ao desenvolvimento da justiça de transição no Brasil. Mas a segunda hipótese sustenta que, dos últimos trabalhos mais aprofundados sobre o tema para cá, este discurso teria sua hegemonia contestada de forma significativa, sendo obrigado a ceder a algumas das demandas de entidades da sociedade civil que até pouco tempo atrás não eram consideradas como negociáveis. Os objetivos e hipóteses centrais da tese serão mobilizados na seguinte estrutura. Capítulo 1: teoria e crítica dos parâmetros normativos da justiça de transição. Capítulo 2: reconstituição histórica e discursiva sobre a anistia e sobre o programa brasileiro de reparações. Capítulo 3: reconstituição discursiva e crítica sobre o julgamento do STF acerca da constitucionalidade da bilateralidade da anistia e sobre o estágio das ações penais movidas pelo Ministério Público Federal. Capítulo 4: reconstituição crítica dos trabalhos da Comissão Nacional da Verdade. / The research has two main objectives: to reconstruct the development of transitional justice in Brazil until today and to identify some of the main reasons underlying the limits of its implementation in the country. According to our main hypotheses, the limits of transitional justice in Brazil are associated with a discourse on the countrys democratization, which holds \"national reconciliation\" as its crucial category. The hypothesis 1 of the research asserts that the discourse of \"national reconciliation\", elaborated at least since the project of amnesty by the Figueiredo government, remains one of the main limitations to the development of transitional justice in Brazil. But the hypothesis 2 maintains that from the last major works on the subject to today, the hegemony of this discourse has been significantly challenged, giving some room to historical claims of civil society that until recently were not considered negotiable. The objectives and main hypotheses will be developed in the following structure. Chapter 1: theory and critique of the normative parameters of transitional justice. Chapter 2: historical and discursive reconstitution of the amnesty and of the Brazilian program of reparation. Chapter 3: discursive reconstitution and critique of the decision of the Brazilian Supreme Court on the amnestys constitutionality and the stage of criminal cases filed by federal prosecutors. Chapter 4: critical reconstitution of the work of the National Truth Commission.

Post-violence periods present sub-Saharan African countries emerging from violence with the challenges of social reconstruction, the rebuilding of peace and the redressing of legacies of human rights violations. To respond to these challenges, these countries are increasingly utilising truth and reconciliation commissions. To date ten truth commissions have been established in the sub-Saharan African region. With varying mandates, the truth commissions have in their specific contexts provided public spaces to survivors of human rights violations to give voice to their personal narratives, and shed light on the forms of persecution they faced. Often missing from the work of these commissions are stories of refugees living in camps. This is an unfortunate exclusion by a transitional justice process because refugees represent a group adversely affected by rights violations. So far in sub-Saharan Africa only the Kenyan, Liberian and Sierra Leonean commissions have incorporated some of their refugee populations in their proceedings. Driven away from their homes and countries by armed strife and other forms of persecution, the stories of sub-Saharan African refugees continue to bear witness to their human rights plight. Their exclusion in the proceedings of most truth commissions is a glaring omission in the work set to champion human rights and consolidate post-violence peace and justice initiatives. Therefore, working with 33 male and female adult refugees living in Dukwi Refugee Camp in Botswana, this narrative study sought to find answers to this exclusion by exploring avenues of inclusion of refugees’ voices, perspectives and lived human rights experiences in the work of truth commissions. Participants came from sub-Saharan African countries which included DR Congo, Somalia and Zimbabwe. An analysis of the interview narratives revealed several key findings. Among others, these findings included the importance of recognising refugees as co-partners in peacebuilding. They also underscored the importance of having responsible democratic leadership promote a culture of peace and human rights and combat perpetrators impunity in post-violence African countries. The study demonstrated that future truth commissions can create opportunities to incorporate refugees’ human rights narratives and give refugees the space to offer solutions for the redress of rights violations and suggestions for promoting durable peace.

This thesis explores the relationship between international war crimes tribunals and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. The aim of the present study was to examine how the role and function of international tribunals has changed since the establishment of the Nuremberg tribunal in the early years after World War II. Due to the evolving nature of international law and the international criminal legal system, international tribunals have become increasingly recognized as an integral component of peacebuilding processes in the aftermath of conflict. As the first international tribunal mandated to restore international peace and security, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set a new precedent for international tribunals. Beginning with its establishment, there appeared to be a new trend of using international judicial mechanisms to promote peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of conflict. One important element of change was the increased tendency of international tribunals to engage in public outreach and help build the capacity of national justice sector institutions. As the first international tribunal to succeed the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals and the first UN tribunal of its kind, the ICTY has shown the extent to which international tribunals facilitate societal reconciliation is, and will be, understood within the context of the legacies they leave behind. Institutions such as the ICTY will not be judged solely on the merits of the ideals on which they were established, but instead on their concrete successes in the domestic arena and their ability to fortify domestic judicial capacity.

This thesis examines the long term effects of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Building on existing critique of the TRC’s narrow mandate and sociologist Melissa Steyn’s argument that apartheid was predicated on an ignorance contract amongst South African citizenry, this thesis asks if the mandate of a truth commission can actually serve to entrench ignorances and divisions. More specifically, this thesis asks in what ways can the ignorance contract be seen in South African society now? It identifies key discourses that represent ongoing ignorances in South Africa: non-acknowledgement, denial, misrecognition and truth and ignorance. Looking at the performance of memory and the areas of immigration, emigration, and gender, this thesis finds that the TRC’s mandate has led to ongoing ignorance about apartheid in South Africa. / Graduate / 0615 / 0331 / alisonj@uvic.ca

Incitement to genocide is a fairly recent and elusive concept in international law. First used at Nuremberg, the concept did not reappear for more than fifty years, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) used it to convict and sentence three media executives: Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, and Hassan Ngeze. Using their trial as a case study, I use rhetorical analysis to help clarify both the concept of "incitement" and the role that morality, politics, and law play in genocide and its aftermath. This case study helps to explain some of the complexities that often accompany genocide. First, because incitement depends on one person's words and another's actions, the answer to the question of who is responsible for the final outcome is unclear. Second, because genocide affects, and is affected by, the decisions of both local and international communities, actions (not) taken by either affect one another in significant ways. Finally, in the aftermath of genocide, questions of culpability, punishment, and reconciliation complicate international law. Based on this case study, I suggest ways in which the international community might learn from what happened in Rwanda.

This thesis is a critique of liberal humanitarian representations of violence in the context of Post-Conflict or Post-Authoritarian struggles against impunity. In particular, it addresses the argument of “cultures of impunity” whereby punishing perpetrators of violations of human rights in transitional societies prevents the endorsement of regimes of silence and the normalisation of wrongdoing. Drawing on a Deconstructivist and Disciplinary methodology this thesis argues that debates about punishment or forgiveness in the aftermath of systematic violence have a wider political meaning and a particular historical function. Instead of mere responses to an external reality “punishment vs. impunity” debates also have a productive facet: because they represent violence in a liberal humanitarian frame, they produce a postconflictual ethos that defines (1) the modes of acceptable political resistance in the present and (2) the achievable limits of justice in the future. In order to explain this wider “politics of impunity” this thesis focuses on the Brazilian transitional case, from the end of the Dirty War in the 1970s to the establishment of the National Truth Commission (2012-2014). As such, it rejects the explanation of Brazil as a quintessential “culture of impunity,” a reasoning that blames the amnesty of perpetrators after the militarised dictatorship (1964-1985) for instituting a regime of silence about the past and creating the conditions for an eternal state of exception in Brazil. Although it recognises the merits of this logic, this work argues against it, reassessing the question in a rather different perspective. First, the thesis suggests a methodological twist: moving focus away from the conditions of implementation of justice in post-conflict and post-authoritarian scenarios into the conditions of possibility of the promise of “never again”. This thesis analyses truth commissions, criminal tribunals, and reparation programmes as parts of a historically situated set of disciplines; that is, as the conjunction between a body of knowledge and modes of conduct centred on a specific representation of violence as an intentional, cyclical, and exceptional phenomenon. In other words, it is by narrowing down what violence is that struggles against impunity can promise a future of non-recurrence. Second, the thesis then describes how this representations of violence were mobilised in order to historically produce a postconflictual reality in Brazil. By analysing the trajectory of the memory struggles (1975-) I explain how this postconflictual reality redefined the meaning of political resistance after the Dirty/Cold War, and by looking at the work of the truth commission I describe in what sense it creates a parsimonious promise of justice.

Doctor Legum - LLD / Uganda and her citizens have endured a troubled, violent, conflict-prone history since independence from the British on 9th October 1962. Conflict in Uganda, just like in many an African country, has its primary root causes in the colonial legacy which sowed a fertile ground for several other secondary causes of present day subsisting conflicts. During Uganda's various military conflicts millions have had their human rights and civil liberties violated with impunity. At the end of each conflict and / or crisis, Uganda has had to grapple with the challenge of finding a lasting solution amidst the significant losses made by the country, many ethnic groups and her citizens. No long term viable and efficient solution or mechanism has been introduced or instituted to forestall future conflicts. What appears to have been introduced or instituted are stopgap measures. Since President Yoweri Museveni took over power on 26 January 1986, a military conflict has been raging in northern Uganda and the surrounding areas spanning eastern Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter: 'DRC'), the Sudan and the Central African Republic (hereafter: 'CAR'). In this decades-old conflict, the war has primarily pitted the Lord's Resistance Army (hereafter: 'LRA') against the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (hereafter: 'UPDF'). Like many conflicts, the more than twenty-year-old contestation has resulted in the gross violations of human rights of millions of people situated across five African states. The human rights violations, which have resulted in the commission of international crimes have been perpetrated and perpetuated with impunity by both warring parties (LRA and UPDF). Although initially an internal conflict, the conflict in northern Uganda has catapulted itself into an international conflict based on the parties involved, the interest generated, the crimes committed and the areas and people affected by it.

Corporations - their power and impact on society - are a neglected topic in political philosophy. In this thesis, I attempt to address this neglect by using the framework of Rawlsian justice to examine what corporations' relationship to social and international justice ought to be. The first part of the thesis is on domestic social justice. I urge that Rawlsians should not begin their inquiry by taking the corporate form as given because the corporation's existence requires a specific set of private-ordering and property rules to be in place. What we should ask, instead, is whether these rules are actually permitted by the two principles of justice as fairness. This question leads to an examination of different economic regimes that are compatible with Rawlsian justice. I focus on one particular regime - that of property-owning democracy. What I find is that while not all versions of property-owning democracy would permit the corporate form, some would actually welcome it due to the feature of 'the separation of ownership and control' that is typical of modern corporations. The second part of the thesis is on international justice. I argue that the best way to situate corporations in Rawls's theory of international justice - his Law of Peoples - is to connect them to the duty of assistance. This is not a straightforward task because a relatively strict reading of the duty of assistance would disallow treating corporations as primarily responsible for discharging it. However, a revisionist approach to the Law of Peoples shows that we can understand the duty of assistance as a part of transitional justice. The significance of this is that Rawls's prescribed ideal theory of international justice does not determine who the agents for transitional justice ought to be or the grounds for attributing responsibility to such agents. We are thus free to adopt David Miller's criteria for attribution of remedial responsibilities to assign to corporations responsibilities for the duty of assistance. What is more, in a particular area of international justice - that of fairness in trade - we can establish that corporations can be primary agents of transitional justice.