Facing the past : Truth, accountability and victims' compensation in South Africa and the Czech Republic
Abstract
One of the priorities for countries emerging from oppressive authoritarian or totalitarian rule is dealing with the crimes committed under the former regime. In recent decades, efforts for doing so have come to be known as transitional justice.
The choices countries make concerning the methods and mechanisms for addressing the past depend to a large extent on the specificities of the local context. It is, however, possible to identify a number of general goals of transitional justice processes - such as truth, justice, reconciliation, institutional reform or victim compensation.
This chapter looks at how the Czech Republic and South Africa have dealt with the legacy of communism and apartheid respectively. It assesses the countries' efforts to come to terms with their past against three of the broad aims of transitional justice - truth-telling and truth-finding, accountability and punishment, and victims' compensation.
By using such a framework, the specific historical, socio-political, institutional and cultural factors accounting for the many differences in the two countries' transitional justice processes are beside the point and rather I focus on revisiting the central dilemmas the two countries were facing in coming to terms with the crimes of the previous regimes.