ABSTRACT

Many observers consider the twentieth century as the bloodiest and cruellest in human history, at least to judge by the sheer numbers of casualties. Although the practice of addressing serious human rights violations of the past has some pedigree in history, the very notion of Transitional Justice (TJ) started to emerge in the mid-1990s only, some years after the fall of the Berlin wall, a period of the twentieth century that drastically changed the outlook of the modern world. A country in turmoil for almost four decades, where human rights of any shades and colours have been committed, Afghanistan remains an anomaly in the TJ discourse, which argues that TJ has become a norm in post-conflict contexts. As regards to TJ measures, in 2005, an Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation and Justice was adopted by the Afghan Government, the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.