Transitional Justice Forum

Views of Liberia's TRC

Does telling (and hearing) the truth always heal?

In the Washington Post of June 18, a British historian called Antony Beevor had an article in which he described the pacto de olvido-- that is, the pact of 'forgetting' about the violent acts committed during Spain's years of civil...

Liberia: Africa's Latest Truth Commission

War-torn Liberia has announced the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission to address human rights violations carried out over the country's recent history of violence, instability, and civil war. The BBC reports that newly-elected Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf stated...

Some strong questions from Kenya

We recently received a couple of very strongly argued comments from Ndung'u Wainaina, the Executive Director of the Nairobi-based International Center for Policy and Conflict. I think our current software enables only two of us here at TJF to see...

Morocco Releases Truth Commission Report

Morocco's Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER) (website in French, Spanish, and Arabic) released yesterday a summary of its report on forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions undertaken between 1956 and 1999. (The International Center for Transitional Justice has a translation of...

Discoveries in Guatemala, and the value of truth-seeking

I've been meaning for a while to get something up here about last summer's "discovery", in a half-abandoned munitions dump in Guatemala City, of a massive cache of files from the Guatemalan National Police, which is described as, "an agency...