Justice Visions

• Documentation practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

  In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation practices, we turn to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Together with Dr. Valérie Arnould, Legal and Policy Advisor on transitional justice with the international NGO Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF), we explore the challenges and possibilities of documenting human rights violations in a country marked by protracted violence, impunity, and ongoing transitional justice initiatives.Valérie reflects on ASF’s multi-layered documentation practices, emphasizing that documentation forms the foundation of transitional justice. She explains that its value extends far beyond supporting trials or reparations mechanisms such as the relatively new Congolese National Reparations Fund (FONAREV). It also serves to counter misinformation, resist denial, and make visible under-recognised forms of victimisation—such as enforced disappearances.The key question in our work is how do you engage in documentation that is truly meaningful to the victims, and in which they can have a direct stake in shaping the record of violations.Furthermore, Valérie sheds light on the practical and ethical dilemmas of documenting in an ongoing conflict. Where you “need to develop a documentation strategy, accepting that it will be imperfect.” While open-source intelligence (OSINT) is often presented as the cutting edge of innovation in human rights monitoring, Valérie warns that in the DRC such tools can risk detaching documentation from the lived realities of victims, particularly given the limited accessibility of digital spaces.She stresses that innovation should not only be about digital methodologies, but also about rethinking “documentation and archives as not being just about data collection and about information, but also about lived experiences and storytelling.” Community-based practices such as local storytelling, dialogue processes, or the preservation of atrocity sites and mass graves already exist, yet remain under-supported by traditional human rights organisations.

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• Documentation and Archiving Practices in the contexts of Peru, Syria and Sudan

  In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation, we continue the conversation on documentation and archiving practices together with Eva Willems and Mina Ibrahim. Eva Willems is a post-doctoral researcher at the History Department and the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University. She examines how peasant militias in Peru use archives to organize life amid conflict. Mina Ibrahim is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg and a visiting professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. He builds archives to hold on to family memories and cope with ongoing displacement. In the conversation with Kim Baudewijns, Eva and Mina reflect on how the distinction between documentationand archiving practices is informed by shifting temporalities. Documentation, as Eva demonstrates, “has a very pragmatic aspect of organizing the war, of organizing military actions, of organizing social cohesion. But archiving has this aspect of organizing the documentation in a way that it can be preserved for the future.”Another key issue emerging from the conversation is the importance of considering a more encompassing view onarchiving practices that goes beyond conceiving archives as collection linked to a state. As Mina emphasises, all types of archiving or archival practices – such as family photos, community collections, personal archives – “can intersect with the state, but they should not always be subject to state institutions.”  Moving beyond the archives, we also need to think of justice as broader than judicial or state-led initiatives and consider shifting meanings of justice. In the context of Peru, Eva reflects on the difficulty actors such as armed groups face in imagining a post-conflict period in which legal justice or accountability can be pursued. Mina then foregrounds how in the Syrian context universal jurisdiction cases in Europe oninternational crimes have highlighted the shifting meanings of justice and the continued importance of archives. He explains how the same activists who compiled evidence for criminal justice were often also critical of the legalprocess, which led them to develop new ideas about why archiving is important.

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• Innovation and Documentation in Transitional Justice

  The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast turns the spotlight on the role of documentation in transitional justice. This theme will guide much of our future work as Tine Destrooper’s project GROUNDOC “Innovation and documentation: Reconstructing the paradigm of transitional justice from the ground up” was awarded an ERC Grant. In this conversation Tine Destrooper, Brigitte Herremans, and Elke Evrard explore the centrality of documentation in TJ initiatives. They discuss how innovations in documentation practices – particularly those emerging from grassroots actors – challenge us to reimagine the TJ paradigm. Highlighting the politics of documentation, Elke Evrard emphasizes how community-based acts challenge conventional notions of evidence and foreground questions of narrative ownership. She also draws attention to the increasing role of new media and digital technologies in documentation processes. While these tools may democratize the landscape because they offer new possibilities for collecting, verifying, and preserving evidence, “the expertise and the technical knowledge that these tools require, can also reinforce certain existing power imbalances between who is creating knowledge and whose knowledge is validated.” Drawing on her research in Syria and Palestine, Brigitte Herremans highlights how grassroots actors are using innovative approaches to documentation as a baseline for proposing new ways of 'doing transitional justice'. For these justice actors, documentation is not only intended to facilitate judicial proceedings, it is a counter-hegemonic practice that challenges epistemic injustice in various ways. “It’s not just 'cold archiving', but the cold archiving is also part of it. And that's so interesting: the interaction between a variety of actors who understand that what they're doing together serves a higher purpose, because they need to resist the erasure of these violations.” Tine Destrooper emphasizes that these contemporary and experimental transitional justice practices are causing a paradigm shift. A more ecosystemic understanding of transitional justice is needed, and documentation efforts driven by grassroots justice actors are a central component thereof. This emerging reality requires us to "rethink transitional justice and transitional justice change theories from the ground up, not just to respond to two decades of increasingly critical transitional justice scholarship, but also to really better capture the reality of those contemporary transitional justice struggles.”

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• Rethinking Justice: Palestine and the Limitations of International Law

  In this special episode of Justice Visions, we shift our typical focus on innovations in transitional justice to a broader debate about international law, its shortcomings, and how to rethink it in ways that benefit victim-survivors of gross human rights violations. We do so on the occasion of the inaugural Lecture of the Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University, which this year was given by Palestinian-American human rights attorney, legal scholar, and activist Noura Erakat. The Chair is awarded to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of human rights.In an interview which took place just before the lecture, Brigitte Herremans talks with Noura about the limits and possibilities of international law amid unfolding atrocities in Gaza. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law, Noura argues that, though not neutral and biased against those most in need of protection, can still be repurposed by those mobilizing it to resist injustices. While Noura’s work and activism focus on Gaza, her arguments about the possibilities and challenges of International Law are relevant to a broad range of  TJ practitioners and scholars who are working in contexts of ongoing conflicts and entrenched accountability crises. It offers critical insights about how legal tools can be reclaimed in transnational struggles, rethinking justice beyond formal mechanisms. Touching on survivor-led agency, Noura challenges the framing of Palestinians as passive victim-survivors. Instead, she insists on recognizing their active role in resisting domination and their capacity to demonstrate the full spectrum of their potential as humans, despite the genocide and complicity of states in the Global North. For Noura, part of the Palestinian victory lies not only in the struggle for liberation, but in living that liberation, through joy, care, and collective action. As she states: "We are not defined by what Israel does to us. We are defined by who we are. We are defined by what we do, what we produce, what we write, how we love one another…. We are defined by who we are, despite that harm, and how we respond to it.”Throughout the conversation, Noura emphasizes the importance of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and the need to resist dominant legal and media frameworks as these continue to erase Palestinian experiences and perspectives. She calls for a decolonial and feminist understanding of justice, and resistance that connects Palestine to global struggles. She also reminds us of the responsibility that comes with activism. “If Palestinians who have been placed in a cage and basically shot at with the most advanced weapons technology is a form of experimentation and without mercy have not given up. What right do I have to give up?”

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• The future of Transitional Justice in Post-Assad Syria

  On December 8, 2024 the unthinkable happened: the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.This new episode of the Justice Visions podcast explores how the mobilization for justice shapes up in the post-Assad era. Brigitte Herremans is joined by our new colleague, Layla Zibar, an urban researcher who focuses on the spatio-temporal dimensions of forced displacements and justice. Together they examine what this historic moment means for the struggle for justice and how it affects victim participation and leadership.Joining the discussion are Yasmen Almeshan, founding member of the Caesar Families Association, and Lina Ghoutouk, a human rights defender researching the gendered impact of enforced disappearances. Yasmen and Lina share their perspectives on the fate of Syria’s disappeared, the urgent need to safeguard detention centers and mass graves, and the growing demand for victim participation in justice processes. The fall of the Assad regime and the transition have reshaped the struggle for justice, truth, and memorialization. One of the main challenges now is to ensure that justice is not delayed or denied.Yasmen has just returned from Syria, where she joined over 50 experts in a workshop on transitional justice, underscoring civil society’s role in shaping the transition, if the new caretaker government engages. The road to justice is long, Yasmen highlights, with the immediate priority being safeguarding records and mass graves, crucial to uncovering the fate of the missing, the most painful and urgent issue. "The stark contrast between the number of those documented as missing and the relatively small number of those released was a heartbreaking shock. It meant that the likelihood of our loved ones being dead had increased significantly, and any hope of their return had all but vanished. Conflicting reports about their fate, along with a spread of rumors, often fueled by social media, only added to the confusion."Lina emphasizes the urgent need for trust among stakeholders and cooperation from the caretaker government, international institutions such as the Independent Institution for Missing Persons in Syria, civil society, and victims. The Syrian government should, in her view, focus on urgent transitional justice measures, such as securing detention centers and mass graves, preserving evidence, and preventing impunity. The most pressing issue is the call from families of the disappeared for a unified approach to address their plight. "They need one place that they can go to and inquire about the fate of their loved ones. They really need to know where they can go to have verified information, to know about services and to inquire about what is available for them and for the survivors and also for the families."

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