Liberia Transitional Justice Forum
Thoughts from Cape Town Immersion Fellowship Program
By: Lawrence T. Randall
Week 1 Continues…
Paige Arthur will return the next morning keen to meet her deliverables. She promptly reckons that the deliverables for Day 1 were unmet. Don’t forget we are discussing TJ History, Theory, Practice/Principal and Mechanism. She has just one hour and thirty minutes on hand to weave through this rather complex subject. As mentioned before, she has written a long and pretty engrossing essay on TJ History but to have effectively delivered on this, required more time than budgeted.
She will now revert to break up sessions assigning countries to four groups for the purpose of determining the right kind of transitional justice mechanism to deploy looking at the various countries contexts. This was a brilliant idea and fairly practical assignment, except that she failed to consider the factor of timing, which made it difficult to fall back on the various presentations to examine how they fitted with the appropriate justice claims and the definitions we had previously carved the day before.
As the last group ended, we were in to time. I thought we didn’t meet the deliverables and for couple for good reasons too. The subject was quite complicated and the idea to change gear without considering that there was no or limited latitude of time, further compounded the situation.
But I expect that Paige would gracefully accept responsibility for this, as combined she had four hours thirty minutes.
Helen Scanlon is a seasoned gender expert that has worked for ICTJ for a while. Her task is to lecture on Gender and Transitional Justice. She will begin by freshening up my rather obscure understanding of the gender concept, a term that has been so widely and often used in the last few years. Helen knew, from experience, that our time keeper carried out her work with ruthless determination and as such she was made to adapt a haste approach.
Sometimes limited in depth and content, she will run the lecture faster, keeping to the limits of time. I thought this was rather troublesome, as some key issues and information are left unabsorbed when lectures are fast tracked this way. Worthy of praise, was Helen choice of a semi-animated style, using audio-visual slides in her PowerPoint presentation on Gender and Transitional Justice. This was excellent. My verdict notwithstanding is reserved until Helen completes some remaining sessions on gender in prosecution, reparation etc. However, it should be said without hesitation that Helen kept the pace and fare pretty well. Let’s see what unfolds in the coming days.
Andre du Toit comes across as a very educated and highly knowledgeable man. One of the earliest scholar’s in the field, du Toit is amongst South Africa’s top intellectual elites, reading from his bio and judging by his visage. Andre as he’s called, will be given a subject (Transitional Justice in Africa) that he will eventually abandon and invite participants to map up areas of interest, which will be left largely unattended. He walks us through a replay of the fundamentals of transitional justice, quite good for starters but unwelcomed by practitioners hungry to amass multiple perspectives on the TJ subject in a relatively short period. The crew will be disappointed but in some respect, the dimensions Andre will eventually navigate were looking more visual, though obviously very theoretical. By measure of the subject matter, discussions were off tangent.
We end the day with a very inspiring documentary on Truth Commissions. See you tomorrow, when South African ‘Ambassador’ on TRC best practices, Yasmin Sooka takes to the stage.
