Human rights and justice in Europe & CIS

The Development Issue:

Transitional Justice, a concept that encompasses the processes of remedying the legacies of large scale human rights abuses through war crimes prosecutions, reparations policies, institutional reform and truth seeking mechanisms, has been steadily gaining momentum in the region. UNDP has been keenly aware of the interdependent legacies of conflict in the region and the need to consolidate resources in order to coordinate efforts on transitional remedies and foster cross border cooperation in all areas. Given this relationship between development and transitional justice, UNDP initiated a regional Transitional Justice Programme in 2005. In order to provide policymakers in the region with the tools to address post-conflict related issues and to consolidate the wealth of experience available both globally and locally, UNDP seeks to establish a Transitional Justice Policy Support and Resource Service (PSRS) serving beneficiaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. The project aims to enable and encourage the formation of development policies alleviating conflict-related tensions through the establishment of a community of practitioners with direct access to each other complemented by a comprehensive information database and consolidated online forum for networking and information exchange. In this way, the PSRS will serve as a bridge between actors working in the field, facilitating the progression of regional transitional justice mechanisms, and broadening the number of national actors that deal with these issues. The PSRS will serve the research community by helping improve policy and decision making through research and analysis in formulating development strategies to ensure long-term stability.

The Outputs:

The service will provide knowledge management instruments including an online reference database of legislation and supporting legal and other materials relevant to transitional justice. This open source database will provide the most comprehensive and authoritative information on research and development. In order to further assist users, a helpdesk research team will be on call to provide research, referral and policy support. Policymakers and researchers will be able to utilize this service in order to increase and improve their activities and coordination within judicial, legislative and related fields.

Reinforcing the research sections of the PSRS will be a coordination mechanism consisting of a virtual community of practitioners. These judges, prosecutors, CSO and government officials working in the field and in the region will have access to an interactive query system, and a database of practitioners throughout the region. These services will enable users to contact their counterparts for general and specific queries, greatly enhancing regional coordination, and leading to a harmonization of knowledge. Complementing this, the general public will be presented with a compendium of information relating to the field and to progress made on these issues in the region.

The Strategy:

In order to provide policymakers in the region with the tools to address post-conflict related issues and to consolidate the wealth of experience available both globally and locally, UNDP seeks to establish a Transitional Justice Policy Support and Resource Service (PSRS) that will be an active service instrument providing policy advice, expert referrals, collecting and disseminating information, analyses and syntheses. The service aims to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and expertise through a cross-institutional process for addressing complex societal challenges, and concurrently reinforce regional coordination. These activities are structured to support and encourage the formation of policies aimed at alleviating the long-standing legacies of the conflicts in the region through feasible strategies for multi-stakeholder consensus building. One of the key issues that will be addressed is access to justice for vulnerable groups, foremost women. The gender perspective of transitional justice will be stressed in order to provide stakeholders with policy tools to foster equitable post-crisis reconstruction. The final product will be able to be replicated for other regions that are faced with the need to create transitional justice mechanisms.