Graduate Fellow Diana Acosta-Navas is a contributor to the Harvard Human Rights Journal's 2017 Online Symposium, Transitional Justice. Her article, "The Search for Truth and the Dignitity of Victims: Analysis of the Colombian Peace Accords," can be found here.

From the Journal: Truth, reconciliation, accountability, and reparation are generally identified as the core components of transitional justice. When it is not politically or practically feasible to hold perpetrators of human rights violations criminally accountable, is it acceptable to settle for alternative–more limited–forms of accountability for the sake of advancing the objectives of truth and reconciliation? In a number of post-authoritarian and post-conflict settings, specialized courts and commissions have been created to administer alternative judicial and non-judicial forms of accountability and redress for victims.

Today, efforts are underway to initiate truth commissions and courts of special jurisdiction in Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Tunisia. In these articles, transitional justice experts–many of them working in these three countries–discuss how to strike a balance between flexibility and accountability in transitional justice processes, the implications of transitional justice for human rights and democracy, and how transitional justice processes can succeed in fraught political contexts.

The full online issue can be found here.