The EU and Transitional Justice
The EU funds international justice generously yet long lacked a strategy of its own: what transitional justice involves and where the policy gap lies.
The relationship between the EU and transitional justice is a study in unfinished business. The European Union is the world's largest funder of international criminal justice, a treaty-bound promoter of human rights, and itself the product of a continent's attempt to prevent the recurrence of war. Yet a landmark 2010 assessment written by Laura Davis for the International Center for Transitional Justice reached a blunt conclusion: the
Union had extensive commitments to justice but no policy, no operational guidelines and no tools for delivering on them. It funded the pursuit of justice generously while effectively outsourcing its understanding of what justice required. That tension, between money and strategy, still defines how the EU engages with societies confronting legacies of atrocity. This article sets out what transitional justice involves, what the…
