Administrative Reparations Programs and Transitional Justice: Dilemmas, Debates and New Directions

Non-judicial victim reparation programs developed within transitional justice processes challenge traditional legal approaches to ensure access to remedies and reparations for victims of human rights violations. Programs respond to a wider range of violations, with the hope of redressing a diversity of victims and their families. Drawing from their prior field work and scholarship over the past two decades, the authors discuss some of the primary dilemmas and debates in the field, while also signaling some significant new directions. Among others, some of the tensions arising with administrative reparation programs relates to the identity of victims and perpetrators; the overlap between collective reparations and development; the need for governments to create large scale programs while satisfying the victims right to reparation in a manner that meets their expectations and needs; and the limits to what a reparations program can do. In this way, victim reparation programs provide important opportunities to revisit the concept of repair, to explore the potential of transformative reparations and to bring more attention to measures of non-repetition if aiming to repair a whole society and assure lasting peace.