At its inception in 2005, the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) was a partnership between the Gulu District NGO Forum and the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In January 2010, we became an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) under Ugandan registration number S. 5914/8602 with support from the Royal Norwegian Embassy, Kampala.
Noticing a gap in information on traditional justice in Acholiland, JRP launched its flagship report, Roco Wat I Acoli: Traditional Approaches to Justice and Reintegration, in September 2005 with assistance from Ker Kwaro Acholi and support from the John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation and the Royal Embassy of the Netherlands in Kampala. This report provided a much-needed analysis of what traditional justice in northern Uganda is, how it is currently practiced and what value it could add to justice and accountability processes.
Women participating in a mato oput ceremony in Acholi
Since then, we have achieved significant impacts in the areas of understanding and implementing justice and reconciliation practices in Uganda. In the Juba Peace Talks, we supported both the Government and LRA delegations in the negotiations and consultations on Agenda Item Three on Accountability and Reconciliation. In our advocacy, we have created awareness on the issues and difficulties facing former combatants as they reintegrate into their communities. In our documentation, we have given communities who suffered major atrocities a space to tell their stories. In our reports, we have explicated how local justice works in relation to national and international processes and exposed the moral and judicial complexities of returnees who are both victim and perpetrator.
JRP has worked with a number of organizations in the past, including Ker Kwaro Acholi, Amnesty Commission, Refugee Law Project (RLP), International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), the Justice Law and Order Sector (JLOS), the Juba Peace Secretariat, Northern Uganda Transitional Justice Working Group (NUTJWG), and more through recent collaborations and partnerships with victims’ networks and associations in West Nile, Teso, Lango and Acholi sub-regions.
JRP’s conviction that effective TJ is a long-term process that will need to be grounded in local concerns, expectations and cultural mores, and in some instances led at community level, means that we are confident that a need for our work will continue for a number of years.
JRP intends over the next five years to pioneer new understandings of how transitional justice can be designed and implemented at a local level to maximize its impact in terms of reconciliation, peace-building and accountability. We aim to seek closure after conflict in Uganda and to develop tools for, and provide support to, local transitional justice exercises in other parts of the Great Lakes region.
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