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UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It seeks to build peace through international cooperation in education, the sciences, culture and communication. UNESCO’s programmes contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals defined in Agenda 2030, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015. Serving as a laboratory of ideas, UNESCO helps countries adopt international standards and manages programmes that foster the free flow of ideas and...

From Berlin to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Sofia, Soviet tanks crossed national borders across East Central Europe at the end of the Second World War. The arrival of the Red Army marked an important turn in history. Within only a few years, the often unpopular communist parties developed into political organizations with mass followings. They managed to seize power, eliminate political opposition to their rule, and purge the state apparatus of undesirable personnel. In Securing the Communist...

OHCHR. (2010, December 23). International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-convention-protection-all-persons-enforced

Entry into force: 23 December 2010, in accordance with article 39(1) which reads as follows: “This Convention shall enter into force on the thirtieth day after the date of deposit with the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the twentieth instrument of ratification or accession.”. Preamble The States Parties to this Convention,

This is a timely empirical study and review of the Gacaca Courts which were established in 2001 in Rwanda as an attempt to prosecute suspects involved in the 1994 genocide. Based on the author's original field work which began in 2003 in Rwanda and which has been updated to the end of 2009, it includes responses from within the Rwandan population. Dr. Clark argues that, despite widespread international scepticism, the Gacaca process has achieved remarkable results in terms of justice and...

In a sweeping review of forty truth commissions, Priscilla Hayner delivers a definitive exploration of the global experience in official truth-seeking after widespread atrocities. When Unspeakable Truths was first published in 2001, it quickly became a classic, helping to define the field of truth commissions and the broader arena of transitional justice. This second edition is fully updated and expanded, covering twenty new commissions formed in the last ten years, analyzing new trends, and...

During the last two decades, the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have attempted to address the numerous human rights abuses that characterized the decades of communist rule. This book examines the main processes of transitional justice that permitted societies in those countries to come to terms with their recent past. It explores lustration, the banning of communist officials and secret political police officers and informers from post-communist politic, ordinary...

When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation. With contributions from poet, essayist, and...

Governments increasingly offer or demand apologies for past human rights abuses, and it is widely believed that such expressions of contrition are necessary to promote reconciliation between former adversaries. The post-World War II experiences of Japan and Germany suggest that international apologies have powerful healing effects when they are offered, and poisonous effects when withheld. West Germany made extensive efforts to atone for wartime crimes-formal apologies, monuments to victims...

A body of critical academic literature has characterized the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a nation-building enterprise with reconciliation as its core. Although this literature is especially influential within South African scholarship, the association of the TRC with reconciliation has become a far wider orthodoxy. An engagement with the full range of the TRC's hearings, its institutional practice and its seven-volume report demonstrates a more contested...

Council of Europe. (2009). Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents - Council of Europe Treaty Series - No.205. Council of Europe. https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=205

This Convention is the first binding international legal instrument to recognise a general right of access to official documents held by public authorities. Transparency of public authorities is a key feature of good governance and an indicator of whether or not a society is genuinely democratic and pluralist. The right of access to official documents is also essential to the self-development of people and to the exercise of fundamental human rights. It also strengthens public authorities’...

Ollé Sesé, M. (2009, May 27). The advance of universal justice. International Federation for Human Rights. https://www.fidh.org/en/region/europe-central-asia/spain/The-advance-of-universal-justice

The road map for limiting the practice of universal justice in Spain is a sad reality. The Spanish Congress has just approved a proposal to reduce universal justice to cases where the people presumed responsible are on Spanish soil or there are Spanish victims, and either way, only when an international court or the country where the crime was committed are not

In 2006, Poland and Romania embarked on renewed lustration programmes. These late lustration policies expanded the scope and transparency measures associated with lustration as a form of transitional justice. While early lustration measures targeted political elites, late lustration policies include public and private sector positions, such as journalists, academics, business leaders, and others in ‘positions of public trust’. Given the legal controversy and moral complexity surrounding...

From Polders to Postmodernism is a broad ranging history of the conception and development of the theories that have guided archivists in their work from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Narrated through the controversial thread of archival appraisal theory, the book examines how archivists have engaged with theory through the tension between keeping records that reflect objective history "as it happened" and subjective decision making in the archive. Through an interpretive...

Despite their increased popularity in Latin America, Africa and Asia, truth commissions have remained an overlooked solution to coming to terms with the recent human rights abuses perpetrated in communist Europe. Since the start of the democratization process in the early 1990s, only Germany, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Romania have employed truth commissions as methods to reckon with communist crimes. These five commissions share important similarities and...

Grounded in historical and social theory, this analysis of the power of archives and the role of archivists in society calls for renewed emphasis on remembrance, evidence, and documentation as a means of securing open government, accountability, diversity, and social justice, within an archival ethics of professional and societal responsibility.