Abstract

DOMINGUEZ MENDOZA, Karen Giselt  and  ROSERO GONZALEZ, Tatiana Andrea. Justice amongst the Grass. The Gacaca Courts and their Reconciliation Lessons for Colombia. Estud. Polit. [online]. 2017, n.51, pp.218-239. ISSN 0121-5167.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.espo.n51a11.

In 1994, Rwanda underwent a terrible genocide between the Hutu and the Tutsi ethnic groups. The Rwandan Patriotic Front stopped the killings. The new government of the RPF built the Gacaca Courts as a justice and truth mechanism, its goal was to prevent the impunity of the genocide suspects and to promote reconciliation among Rwandans. The present article makes a contribution to the analysis of this case in order to establish how the experience of the Gacaca Courts can teach us something about the reconciliation process and for the current implementation of the Peace Agreements between the FARC-EP and the Colombian Government. The analysis focus on justice and reconciliation as the principal elements of the Gacaca Courts in order to build a parallelism between their postulates and experiences in implementing international legal standards of human rights, and the legitimacy of the mechanism of the Special Peace Jurisdiction in Colombia.

Keywords : Transitional Justice; Human Rights; Reconciliation; Rwanda; Colombia.

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