Legitimacy, accountability, victims' participation and reparation in transitional justice settings - lessons from and for Colombia

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It is widely accepted that Transitional Justice (TJ) contributes to building peace, preventing new conflict and promoting the rights of victims of conflict. It can also help to identify the root causes of inequality and marginalisation. It can therefore enhance development in various ways: through promoting the rule of law, strengthening institutions, increasing access to justice, reducing inequalities and promoting gender equality. The currently predominant view is that a holistic approach to TJ needs to be adopted after periods of armed conflict in which massive human rights violations occurred, based on a coexistence of mechanisms of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. However, it is not yet clearly understood how to resolve the possible tensions between the different components of this approach and how to put it into practice successfully so that the legitimacy of a TJ process is enhanced rather than undermined. It is equally still an open question what would be necessary for TJ to have a positive effect on development.Colombia is the first country worldwide that designed a TJ process that aims to put into practice the theory of the holistic approach to TJ. This puts to the forefront novel questions of far-reaching significance for achieving peace, strengthening institutions, and improving the situation of victims of conflict who are often the most disempowered in a society. The legitimacy of the justice component of the Colombian TJ process, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP), has been highly contested from the outset. This has partly been due to the fact that, in implementing the holistic approach to TJ, it provides the perpetrators of mass atrocities with special sanctions (that do not include imprisonment) in exchange for truth, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. Among the supporters of the SJP, this approach is regarded as legitimate because of its "victim-centred" focus which is meant to ensure that procedures are designed and undertaken so that victims can participate effectively at every stage and have a say on how to best satisfy their rights to truth, justice and reparation throughout. Its opponents regard this as impunity.The SJP is only in its second year and this early stage of its operation provides a unique opportunity to analyse the potential and challenges of the implementation of some of the features of the holistic approach to TJ in practice. Such an analysis is of crucial importance at this particular point in time, as it will feed back into the Colombian peace-building process while it evolves, and it will also inform academic debate and the formulation of future TJ processes worldwide, which primarily take place in LMIC and therefore have an important link to development. Through various research methods, in particular semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation in public hearings, we will collect and process original data on how the implementation of the holistic approach to TJ in Colombia is perceived by victims and other key stakeholders, and in particular on what they perceive as the main issues that weaken or increase the legitimacy of the justice process as carried out by the SJP. We will add to the existing academic literature through our analysis of the novel Colombian approach to TJ and lessons to be learned from it. Our research also aims at informing TJ practice, both in Colombia and internationally. In Colombia through briefing papers specifically aimed at assisting the SJP in addressing pressing questions such as how to operationalise victim participation and the restorative component of the special sanctions in a way that maximises their legitimacy, and how to define key legal concepts such as the criteria according to which cases are selected for investigation.