I have been reading and mulling over Rosemary Nagy’s 2008 article in Third World Quarterly, entitled “Transitional Justice as Global Project: critical reflections” and recently happened to see Patrick Wegner’s post on Justice on Conflict on the “ICC Complementarity, Positive Peace and Comprehensive Approaches in Transitional Justice” both of which ask for a connection between international and domestic roles in the construction of transitional justice mechanisms.
One of Nagy’s main complaints is the colonialist and indifference as well as blameless approach to transitional justice taken by international actors. This approach, she says, leaves out certain victims, and perpetrators–and leads to a misguided approach to transition, timing, reconciliation and ending violations of human rights and other violence. An example she gives are the Iraq Tribunal and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both of which neglected structural and local experiences. In the Iraq case, more importantly, she notes the exclusion of mid-conflict violence by the structuring of the timing of atrocities and transition.
Likewise, Wegner criticizes the lack of parallel structure between the ICC and the domestic constituencies’ needs for mechanisms such as truth commissions, and local trials.
While the ICC’s requirements for complementarity have a desperate need for a more robust approach, and a more meaningful application—is the Libyan case really one where it can be said that complementarity was addressed?—the uneasy relationship between international actors and domestic actors, needs and populations is inherent to a notion that there can be global and domestic justice.
Either one frames contemporary justice from an inclusive point of view—in which the ICC is a natural extension of all states criminal justice systems—or it is a distinct form at the international level, operating from a parallel but separate authority.
Depending on how one chooses to approach it, transitional and global justice practices must then be chosen differently, and have different expectations. Local notions of justice might way more than international ones if justice as a concept is differentiated. This might mean admitting the arguments of Iraqis who wanted executions in opposition to human rights advocates around the world who railed against the execution of Saddam Hussein. It might also mean listening more closely to the needs of Libyan authorities and civil society, as well as those of Sudan, Kenya and Uganda.
On the other hand, if indeed global justice–particularly global criminal justice–is inseparable from domestic variants, local, regional and state cultures of justice must be reflected in its practice; procedurally, as well as punitively.
