ABSTRACT
In the context of transitional justice, restorative justice is often associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and with forms of traditional informal justice such as mato oput in northern Uganda, which may be seen as antithetical to the primary aim of holding perpetrators to account for past human rights violations. Despite these and other restorative mechanisms being included in the broad framework of transitional justice, they are considered insufficient, if not inferior, in the face of a normative ‘justice cascade’ that privileges prosecution and punishment over restoration. This emphasis on applying a Western legal prosecutorial model of retributive justice is reflected in the creation and operation of the world's first permanent International Criminal Court, and in the four key pillars of transitional justice promulgated by the United Nations – prosecution initiatives, truth seeking, reparations and institutional reform – which marginalise or exclude restorative elements. At the same time, reconciliation and reintegration, which may be considered to be goals of restorative justice, have been excluded as key pillars. This paper uses a restorative justice lens to analyse how these various elements of truth, accountability, reparation, reconciliation and reintegration are interpreted and applied in the transitional justice context and explores the implications for transitional justice to achieve its potential as a restorative and transformative peacebuilding process.
