Transitional Justice and Local Ownership: A Framework for the Protection of Human Rights

The study of modern transitional justice goes back to the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Since these trials many different mechanisms have been attempted, including traditional trials, conditional amnesties and other trial like entities. Since post-genocide Rwanda attempted to incorporate a traditional dispute resolution mechanism into post-genocide reconstruction, there has been much interest in the incorporation of local tradition and norms into the transitional justice process. This type of local ownership has many advantages, but also, in the case of Rwanda, presented the problem of its general incompatibility with international fair trials norms. This paper represents an attempt to consolidate the two, creating a framework by which local traditions and norms can be inserted into transitional justice mechanisms while still respecting internationally recognized fair trial rights.