Human Rights and Transitional Justice: Assessing Difference Discourses of Justice.

The international pursuit of human rights has held to a proliferation of institutions, laws mechanisms ideas and practitioners. Decades of conferences and conventions, rulings and scholarship have left a robust legacy of rights discourse and competing conceptions of justice. Interestingly enough, though transitional justice (the practice of accounting for violations of human rights by prior regimes) has “cascaded” into international human rights discourse as post-conflict practice in the last decade there has been little to no discussion of the puzzling divergences between its values and those of the international human rights regime. This paper seeks to outline what is justice in transitional justice. Using content and discourse analysis approach the project looks at the language of peace agreements and launching documents/mandates in three cases: the ICTY of the former Yugoslavia; South Africa’s TRC and the Timorese hybrid courts; the paper asks is there is a distinct justice discourse emerging in transitional justice? It then discusses some of the ways in which this discourse reflects and differs from that of global human rights. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]