What do Survivors Want? A Victim-Centred Approach to Conflict Related Human Rights Abuses.

Justice for victim/survivors of conflict related violence, harm and abuse is central to peace-building. As a result, the UN, NGOs, national government peace agreements have placed an emphasis on ending impunity for conflict related human rights abuses and delivering justice for victim/survivors. The resultant model to achieve justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity has become synonymous with criminal/trial justice, with the focus on procedure and punishment. However, prosecutions for forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture, sexual violence and other human rights abuses are few and sporadic, both at national and international levels (Valencia et al., 2019). Even when prosecutions for human rights abuses occur, perpetrators often receive minimal sentences (Delbyck 2018). Consequently, the judicial process has been criticised for its poor record in delivering justice. Alongside criticisms for re-traumatising and re-victimising victim/survivors, causing serious psychosocial harm (Villa Gómez 2013); not protecting witnesses and judges from intimidation, physical violence and discrimination; and for reproducing gender and racial inequalities (Aroussi 2011; Henry 2009).As a result of such criticisms, academics, human rights advocates, legal professionals, and NGOs, have promoted alternative models to achieve justice such as transformative gender justice, restorative justice, and social justice. However, these means to seek justice, as well trial justice, are premised on fixed assumptions of what victim/survivors want and need. As McGlynn and Westmarland note ¿the person defining justice is rarely (if ever) the victim-survivor of the harm or abuse¿ (McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019: 181). There have been very few empirical studies into understandings of justice from the viewpoint of victim/survivors, and even then they typically emerge from non-conflict settings, mainly Western liberal democracies (Herman 2005; Jülich 2006; Clark 2015; Holder 2015; McGlynn and Westmarland 2019). Indeed, to date there are only two studies of conflict-related human rights abuses; on male victim/survivors of sexual violence in Uganda (Schultz 2020) and the families of the disappeared in Nepal (Robins 2011).This project aims to build and expand on this crucial work by exploring Colombian victim/survivors views on justice, so that victim/survivors¿ wants and needs can feed directly into discussions on transitional justice, in order to bridge the `justice gap¿. The work of McGlynn and Westmarland (2019), Robins (2011) and Schultz (2020) suggest that there is a disconnect between the criminal justice response prioritised by the UN, NGOs, and policymakers and what victim/survivors want. This dissonance would arguably be even more fractured in countries, like Colombia, with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities who perceive the justice system as inaccessible, distant and a source of historic social exclusion (Bueno-Hansen 2010). In order to truly `realise victim¿s rights¿ as stated in Chapter 5 of the Colombian Peace Agreement, to meet the UN¿s SDG16 and the UK¿s Aid Strategy¿s aim to strengthen global peace, security and governance, our justice modules must be able to meet the needs of those it proclaims to provide for. To deliver meaningful justice, which is crucial to successful peacebuilding and reconciliation, we must first understand how victim/survivors of human rights abuses conceptualise justice. Lasting over six decades, the Colombian armed conflict is one of the longest in the world. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died violently through massacres and targeted assassinations. Widespread forced disappearances, forced kidnapping, torture, executions, the use of anti-personnel mines, and sexual violence have all been reported. Furthermore, the conflict has seen over 8 million people displaced. Displacement has, for instance, rendered women and children vulnerable to sex and gender-based violence. Rape, control over reproductive decisions, and forced prostitution have been the dominant experiences of violence and abuse by women in displaced settings (Wirtz et al 2014). Given the scale of human rights abuses in Colombia, the project will investigate the different understandings of justice in two different Colombian communities. The project will work with 1) displaced communities in Soacha, Bogota, therefore working with indigenous and Afro-Colombian persons and 2) the community of Vista Hermosa (comprised largely of campesinos and families who remained despite continuous conflict). This will enable us to examine whether perceptions on justice differ depending on experience, age, race, gender, geography and time and analyse contrasts between the experience of those victims that have stayed in their territories and those who have experienced exile and displacement. Vista Hermosa was chosen in order to articulate this project to the participative research processes developed by the PI and CI in this site. Furthermore, it has a long history of armed conflict with an extended period of hegemonic presence of the FARC guerrilla. Since they laid down the arms, the territory has become a laboratory for peacebuilding.Most existing modules of how to deliver justice are constructed for a universal category of `victim/survivors¿, and therefore cannot account for the personal and variant nature of justice. In order to build a victim-centred, flexible and multidimensional account of justice this project will pay close attention to existing community justice systems, intergenerational aspects and how other injustices (displacement, lack of access to basic services as a result of conflict etc.) shape wants and needs. For example, sexual violence can cause infertility, HIV/AIDS, PTSD, and many other medical conditions. The lack of medical training and supplies mean that many victims/survivors suffer long lasting health problems (Page and Whitt 2019). Furthermore, stigma, discrimination and health problems create barriers to education, employment, marriage and other forms of community reintegration (Albutt et al 2017). Resultantly for victim/survivors of sexual violence justice might mean a) community reintegration, b) access to adequate health care, c) financial compensation; d) reproductive rights; e) official and public acknowledgement; and f) all the aforementioned yet prioritised in different ways. Therefore, the project aims to capture varied and subjective views on justice in Colombia from victim/survivors of the conflict, looking at how understandings of justice may shift based on changing circumstances and new experiences.