Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, editors, Justice, Memory, and Redress in Romania: New Insights (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Exploring Restorative Justice in Transitional Justice: The Romanian Mineriad of June 1990
Previous research on transitional justice in Eastern Europe focused on redressing the traumatic past and human rights abuses committed during the communist and soviet leaderships. Romania shifted from a communist to a democratic regime in 1989, however, conflicts still spurred due to tensions and disagreements towards the new ‘democratic’ leadership. The most violent post-communist conflict in Romania is the Mineriad of June 1990 in which thousands of demonstrators were attacked by the police, military, and miners of the Targu Jiu valley; resulting in thousands of people being injured, and several losing their lives. This thesis looks at the Romanian Mineriad of June 1990, and explores what restorative justice could look like within a transitional justice framework that can be used to redress this particular past. By looking at a past truth commission and other attempts at redressing communist and post-communist human rights abuses in Romania, this thesis concludes that further transitional justice mechanisms would not necessarily bring more to the table, but instead risk being viewed as further delay from conventional criminal justice. In answering what restorative mechanisms can be used now for this situation, the qualitative research done for the purpose of this thesis suggests that, by starting from victim’s needs, we can conclude that what is truly desired at the moment is that the court case is finalised, compensations are offered, and the accused are held accountable. As such, restorative justice could indeed be present intrinsically in the justice process if the Romanian High Court would agree upon: making hearings with victims and accused public, allowing for transparency in the court decisions and procedural justice, holding the leadership of the time accountable for its implication, and offering the compensations necessary to the victims that have suffered long term. This is a momentous occasion for the Romanian justice system and government to really take a stand against crimes committed against civilians during the transition to democracy 26 years ago. As such this thesis also suggests that a well stated public apology acknowledging the wrongdoings of the past, rewriting the official history to include the culpability of the back-then ‘democratic’ state in organising and allowing for the conflict to escalate, and apologising for the long delay in bringing justice to the stakeholders – would all contribute to an improvement in national public trust and state legitimacy.
Neither Forgiving, Nor Punishing?: Transitional Justice in Romania
Part of the first volume comparing Latin American and Eastern European transitional justice approaches. The project, which involves researchers from Nuffield College (Oxford University), El Colegio de Mexico and United Nations University in Tokyo, is coordinated by Vesselin Popovski. Generously financed by all three universities.
This chapter explores the relationship between transitional criminal justice and history writing in post-Communist Romania. It analyses the trials held concerning the repression of the December 1989 popular uprising, focusing on the narratives they have produced about the fall of the Ceauşescu regime and the responsibility for state-perpetrated violence. On the one hand, we evaluate the various interpretations that trials have given the events of December 1989, the symbolic founding moment of a new political order, as well as the political legitimacies constructed around these narratives. On the other hand, the chapter contributes to the general debate on the role of transitional criminal justice in building a common historical understanding of a former dictatorial regime. We will show that in Romania, in spite of important contributions of these trials to a gradual normalisation of the historical discourse about December 1989, their epistemic function was compromised by the interference of politics in the working of justice, and by the lack of predictability in judicial procedures.
Post-Communist Transitional Justice at 25: Unresolved Dilemmas
2014
The main purpose of this article is to assess the r elationship between transitional justice and democratization in post-communist Easte rn Europe since the fall of communism in 1989. The analysis is focused on the role of lustra tion and the opening of communist secret police files in encouraging accountability and promoting t he rule of law. An overview of these developments in the countries of the region – inclu ding Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – emphasizes the different appr oaches undertaken in dealing with the abuses and crimes committed by previous non-democratic gov ernments. These differences are examined in relationship to three interrelated variables: (1 ) the exit mode from communism; (2) the nature of the communist regime; and (3) the politics of th e present. The second part of the article provides an extensive analysis of the Romanian case, whose specificity lies in its violent and abrupt exit from communism. The unfinished reckonin g wi...
Although the revival of pragmatic, as well as scholarly, interest in transitional justice has been prompted by recent democratization procedures, this chapter argues that the general spirit of transitional justice in post-communist states in East-Central Europe is very similar to those purges which took place in Europe after the Second World War. Not only did the new elites in both cases aim to rewrite history by drawing a clear line between the guilty (collaborators, former elites, and secret service agents) and the innocent/victims (the rest of the population), but they also used transitional justice (trials, “national disgrace”, screening, and lustration) to stabilize and legitimize their rule. This chapter analyzes these parallels between postwar and post-communist transitional justice, focusing on several Central-European countries (Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). These countries offer good examples to prove the above-mentioned hypothesis, and they also provide good cases for comparative studies not only between countries, but also over time. At the same time, examples and arguments are also drawn from postwar France, the exemplary case of postwar transitional justice and the reconstruction of history
International Journal of Transitional Justice
In 2016, over 25 years after the fall of the communist regime, the Romanian Supreme Court of Justice convicted for the first time two former military officials for political crimes perpetrated in the 1950s, the harshest repressive period of the previous dictatorship. The verdicts marked a radical break with the prior legal approaches to prosecuting communist crimes in this country inasmuch as international criminal law (ICL) was now employed in order to overcome impunity. This article shows how the current shifts in Romanian jurisprudence have been built upon, and have drawn inspiration from, a recent global convergence towards the use of ICL for addressing the crimes of dictatorial regimes and the obstacles to their prosecution, such as amnesties or statutory limitations. It emphasizes the importance of noncoercive exogenous influences in enabling changes in the Romanian process of dealing with the past.