Summary
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Truth commissions and trials are now operating concurrently as mechanisms of transitional justice in settings as diverse as Peru, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. While truth commissions and trials play complementary roles in transitional justice, their concurrent operation also raises novel issues of coordination. Where left unresolved, these coordination issues—including information and resource sharing, handling of evidence and witnesses, and sequencing of investigations and outcomes—threaten to undermine individual mandates and the overall goals of transitional justice. Drawing on a case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court in Sierra Leone, this Note proposes a loose framework for making coordination decisions, which identifies context-specific transitional justice goals and then seeks out the arrangements that best achieve those goals. This totality-ofthe- circumstances approach allows the specific characteristics of each transitioning society to shape coordination, while recognizing the common needs of justice, accountability, and reconciliation to which transitional justice responds. (author's abstract).
Link: http://www.columbialawreview.org/pdf/Evenson-WebCopy.pdf
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