Abstract
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[extract] As Ruti Teitel has outlined, transitional justice can be seen as evolving in three
phases. The first involved criminal trials, such as Nuremberg and Tokyo, which
sought to hold individuals accountable for abuses of human rights during World War
II, and this was buttressed by the development of various international legal
instruments to protect rights which today constitute a central aspect of approaches to transitional justice. In the 1980s and 1990s a second phase of transitional justice
occurred with post-dictatorship tribunals and bodies such as truth commissions, both
of which ‘thickened’ transitional justice by introducing a restorative element. The
third phase has involved the normalisation of transitional justice mechanisms through
international tribunals and the International Criminal Court, and national and hybrid
tribunals and courts increasingly link transitional justice with modern state-building in
post-conflict societies. As Lia Kent outlines in this important study, in the case of East
Timor (Timor Leste) the ‘toolkit’ for dealing with post-conflict situations involved
both retributive and restorative mechanisms, but international and local agendas can
differ widely when it comes to the idea of a society ‘moving on’.