TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND THE RULE OF LAW

This chapter examines the synergies and tensions between the rule of law and transitional justice. Transitional justice is a body of scholarship and practice that focuses on judicial and non-judicial responses to wrongdoing characteristically committed during the course of conflict and repression. Such responses occur in the midst of an attempted political transition towards a less repressive and conflictual state of affairs. The first provides an overview of transitional justice, outlining the political contexts in which it is pursued and the normative goals of processes of transitional justice. The section also underscores the absence of the rule of law in the contexts that pursue transitional justice, and the place of the rule of law among transitional justice objectives. The second section focuses on the idea of the rule of law. After delimiting the conception of the rule of law relevant for transitional justice, I highlight the tensions that often exist between the structure of transitional justice criminal trials and the requirements of the rule of law, the justificatory and empirical questions this tension raises, and the further work that remains to be done to articulate rule of law desiderata for non-trial processes of transitional justice.