Forging Regional Solutions in the MENA Transitional Justice Academy
“ The Academy was excellent by all training standards. The skills and knowledge varied beautifully. The accompanying exchange experiences were valuable, particularly the field visit to a former detention center and listening to the experiences of young advocates working in post-war peace- building. — MENA Transitional Justice Academy participant ”
Recent political transitions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region show that many countries there are facing common challenges with regional dimensions and implications, including protracted conflicts involving multiple parties, forced migration and failed development models. To date, most transitional justice programming in the MENA region has focused on national-level processes and traditional actors, often limited to specific in-country trainings in individual MENA states and on specific aspects of transitional justice. Taking a far more holistic approach through its MENA Transitional Justice Academy, GIJTR has found that in the face of these shared challenges, regional solutions are essential for laying durable foundations to promote future stability. To date, GIJTR has conducted three cohorts of the MENA TJ Academy, bringing together activists and practitioners from a range of MENA states—including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen—to gain an understanding of the key debates in the field related to peace and justice, share experiences of successes and challenges in their work and increase their common knowledge base of transitional justice tools and approaches.
While the Academies were conducted from 2016 to 2021, their impact has continued. For instance, one participant, in partnership with the Syrian NGO The Day After, utilized GIJTR support to coordinate three documentation training workshops for Northern Syrian and Turkish women who are former detainees. As a result of this pilot project, some of the women chose for the first time to come forward to recount their detention experiences, and one woman has started working as a documenter at a human rights organization.
Another GIJTR-funded project supported a participant’s work with a group of Syrian legal experts to develop a preliminary vision of what transitional justice might look like in the Syrian context, using lessons learned from other contexts in the region, including Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia. The resulting report was then
presented at an open dialogue that brought together members of the Syrian Constitutional Committee and CSOs concerned with transitional justice, laying the groundwork for a more integrated course of action toward transitional justice in Syria.
Image of participants in GIJTR’s MENA Transitional Justice Academy, which builds the capacity of activists and practitioners in the region.
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Transforming Transitional Justice: A Decade of Change, Growth & Sustained Impact—A Summary Report
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