On 5 June 2013, JRP and Avocats Sans Frontières held a one-day consultative meeting with victim communities on the recently released draft of the national Transitional Justice Policy
The meeting allowed the facilitators to share the draft policy with victims from across Acholi sub-region, explain key aspects of the policy, and ascertain from the participants their views, impressions, expectations and desires regarding these key aspects: criminal prosecutions, truth-telling, traditional justice, and reparations in particular.
The Uganda Reconciliation Barometer is a presentation of the attitudes and perceptions of Northern Ugandans on critical justice and reconciliation issues.
In November 2012, JRP released the first issue of the UG Reconciliation Barometer, a report which seeks to present the findings survey findings from seven districts across the Acholi sub-region. Research for it was conducted in all 60 sub-counties across those districts, including former IDP camps, rural communities, urban and semi-urban areas.
The report measures the attitudes and perceptions of northern Ugandans on critical justice and reconciliation issues since the relative calm restored following the relocation of LRA fighters to neighboring countries.
This annual report outlines JRP’s accomplishments over the past year and highlights our commitments to bringing grassroots communities together to galvanise efforts for justice and human rights. It outlines key activities from the Community Documentation, Community Mobilization, Gender Justice and Communications departments and is a selection and general overview of our outputs and accomplishments in 2011.
Participants during the gender justice dialogue in Gulu
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in collaboration with the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP), held a one-day dialogue on opportunities and challenges for gender and transitional justice (TJ) on Tuesday, September 27, 2011, at Churchill Courts in Gulu, northern Uganda. The event was attended by 33 participants from across the greater North, including Teso, Lango and Acholi sub-regions. Facilitators shared presentations on a range of topics relating to gender, including a review of the existing domestic and international frameworks, an analysis on the potential of domestic courts to try sexual and gender-based crimes, mainstreaming gender in traditional justice and truth-seeking processes, prospects of engendering TJ in Uganda through JLOS, protecting women’s rights in a post-conflict setting, a review of reparations and reconstruction programs from a women’s rights perspective, and building consensus and a way forward. Throughout the dialogue, there were also opportunities for participants to share their views and experiences and ask questions or provide comments on the facilitators’ presentations. The majority of participant feedback is captured in the four Reactions sections of this report.
JRP's Lino Owor Ogora gives leads the stocktaking exercise at the reparations dialogue
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in collaboration with the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) and the Soroti Development Association & NGOs Network (SODANN), held a one-day dialogue on reparations for victims of conflict in northern Uganda on Thursday, August 25, 2011, at Landmark Hotel in Soroti. The event was attended by 25 participants from across the greater North, including Teso, Lango, Acholi, Karamoja and West Nile sub-regions. Facilitators shared presentations on a range of topics relating to reparations, including a conceptual overview of reparations programmes, engendering reparations, international and domestic legal frameworks for reparations, stocktaking in the represented sub-regions, victims’ perspectives, the Kenyan experience, the relationship between reparations and development projects and building consensus and a way forward. Throughout the event, there were also opportunities for participants to share their views and experiences and ask questions or provide comments on the facilitators’ presentations. The majority of participant feedback is captured in the five Discussion sections of this report.
This report, “Enhancing Grassroots Involvement in Transitional Justice Debates: A Report on Consultations held with victims and civil society organizations in West Nile, Acholi, Lango and Teso Sub-regions in Northern Uganda,” is the product of consultations by JRP and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR).
Between November 2010 and February 2011, the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) in collaboration with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) organized a series of consultations with victims of the conflict in northern Uganda. These consultations were entitled “Enhancing grassroots involvement in transitional justice debates” and covered the themes of truth telling, traditional justice, reparations and gender justice.
The consultations were aimed at complementing the countrywide consultations by the Justice, Law and Order Sector (JLOS) on truth seeking and traditional justice. The key findings presented in the report are a synthesis of the victims’ voices on what their views are on truth seeking, traditional justice, reparations and gender justice.
This report is aimed at informing JLOS and other relevant stakeholders working on issues pertaining to victims in northern Uganda about the needs of these victims, as expressed by the individuals themselves.
The skull of a victim rests at the Barlonyo massacre site, 2006
A Joint Report by JRP and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
With funding from the Austrian Development Cooperation
Written by: Julian Hopwood
This report examines the role memorials have played in Uganda’s transitional justice process. Addressed to community members, conflict survivors, policymakers, and donors, it reviews existing memorials and offers recommendations to those seeking to initiate new memorial activities. It is based on research conducted in the Acholi and Lango sub-regions of northern Uganda, involving the eponymous ethnic groups.
A boy stands playfully in a returned homestead in northern Uganda
The year 2010 presented a significant step in the future of JRP following the transition from a project created in 2004 to an independent NGO with headquarters in Gulu. JRP has a national mandate to carry out transitional justice activities in Uganda. During the past year, the staff at JRP — together with our student interns, community volunteers, local victim groups and partners — made significant contributions towards the success of planned programs for the year. In particular, working in over twenty local communities in north, northeastern and West Nile regions presented us with unique insights into war-affected communities’ quests for justice, reconciliation and sustainable peace in Uganda.
Our engagements in mobilizing civil society across Acholi, Lango, Teso and West Nile sub-regions for meaningful participation in discourses on justice and reconciliation provided an opportunity for us to re-echo our commitment of ensuring that victims should be at the centre of every stage of developing any transitional justice process in Uganda.
Some key areas of our engagements in the past year include empowering victims to articulate their own positions on transitional justice, for instance the ‘Women’s Gender Justice Statement,’ which was circulated to policy-makers and to a wider audience nationally and internationally. We also mainstreamed gender-related concerns affecting young, formerly abducted mothers in most of our work with civil society, whilst ensuring that our documentation programme amplifies the voices of the young and vulnerable women in northern Uganda. In doing this, we integrated within JRP a unique documentation project, Ododo Wa: Our Stories, where several women were engaged in participatory research and training in leadership and advocacy skills. A testimony by one young woman we worked with sums it all up. She remarked, “…for long we victims of torture, rape and forced marriage have remained silent. Today we have the chance to speak on our own behalf marking an end to a long period of silence. My story has got a healing power and a testimony that many other girls went through the same suffering.”
In addition, our unique action-oriented research interventions led us into publishing important local-level based research reports such as As Long as You Live, You Will Survive on the Omot massacre providing additional insights into ‘what needs to be done’ to ensure that the justice needs of the voiceless are brought to the attention of civil society and policy-makers.
In this community dialogue report, respondents discuss some of the many problems faced by those living in areas affected by the conflict in northern Uganda. The issues mentioned include the reintegration of formerly-abducted youth, disputes over land amongst those returning from captivity and from displaced persons camps and the collapse of traditional family structures through family breakdown, the phenomenon of child-headed households and a loss of respect for parents and elders.
Traditional spiritual understandings, particularly those related to the burial of people killed in the conflict, are used by many of the respondents to explain the hardships faced by their communities and to formulate possible solutions.
In this community dialogue, respondents voice their views on the challenges affecting their communities in the wake of decades of violent conflict in northern Uganda. The issues discussed include the unexploded ordinance scattered throughout the region, disputes over land ownership amongst those returning from conflict or from displaced persons camps, the negative effects of humanitarian aid and the issues that arise as former LRA attempt to return to civilian society.
The comments of many of the respondents reveal a deep distrust of the Ugandan government as well as a strong faith in traditional spiritual beliefs, often used as a means of making sense of and developing solutions to many of the problems faced by war-affected communities.
