Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

Collecting and disseminating data on transitional justice mechanisms can help lay the foundation for a more just future.

In 2024, Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET), a project Geoff Dancy has co-directed for five years, released a global database of human rights accountability mechanisms dating from 1970 to 2020. The project’s website has attracted tens of thousands of users, many seeking background information on cases of interest or exploring processes used in different contexts. 

But some commentators question the purpose of collecting data on truth, justice, and reparations in the current moment. For instance, according to the Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, we have now arrived at the end-times of transitional justice—just like we arrived at the end-times of human rights over a decade ago. If this claim were true, it would raise a good question: what’s the point of gathering data if the liberal world order is unraveling, and faith in the transitional justice project is waning along with it? 

A commitment to prevention, recognition, and accountability

Critical theorists often presume that a neoliberal obsession with standardizing knowledge and decontextualizing political problems drives the collection of human rights data. This is an oversimplification. The TJET team’s values are not tied to a particular method or way of thinking but by three commitments that have formed through decades of community engagement and research.

Our first commitment is to prevent atrocities. Avoiding catastrophic political violence, while not the sole aim of justice, certainly seems like a necessary precondition for a just society. Our second commitment is to recognize and acknowledge survivors of mass violence. This means centering survivors in the processes and outcomes of transitional justice, even at the risk of disagreement and contestation. And our third commitment is to transparently document not only human rights violations but also efforts at human rights accountability.  With these values in mind, we can return to the question: why, during turbulent times, is it important to publish and update an archival database on transitional justice? 

The first reason is preparedness. We may well stand at the end of a pro-accountability era. For instance, our data show a clear decline in the number of human rights criminal prosecutions since 2010. And truth commissions, while still frequently established, seem to be accomplishing less. Now, states seem keen on fighting wars rather than preventing them. While arms transfers occur at their highest rate since 1990, foreign assistance for governance and institution-building is drying up.

However, there is no reason to suspect that these dismaying trends will last forever. Today’s authoritarian regimes are tomorrow’s transitional regimes, and today’s conflict zones are tomorrow’s post-conflict zones. When global conditions shift back from extremism to moderation, a repository of past experiences—including what did or did not work—may be helpful.

The second reason is remembrance. States do their level best to hide, bury, or erase information on human rights violations. The United States, for example, keeps at best unreliable national data on shootings by police, and in 2025, it cut funding to a Yale University team tracking the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children. China is hiding an enormous series of concentration camps in the country’s west, and Israel is concealing extensive torture of Palestinians detained since 2023 under emergency laws. These are just a few instances of contemporary states suppressing knowledge of the human rights abuses they commit. There are many, many more.

At the same time, data on accountability for violations also regularly disappears. For example, truth commission reports are often very difficult to find—sometimes because governments limit access to them and sometimes because they live on outdated websites. Information on prosecutions can be equally difficult to track. Justice ministries often do not publish updated case files, and older news articles on prosecutions disappear from the public record. Efforts at cross-national or comparative data collection fall into disuse or disrepair when deprived of continued support and attention. This is problematic because knowing what has happened—and what is happening—to hold human rights violators accountable for their actions is a public good. Many transitional justice mechanisms represent hard-won achievements for victims and human rights defenders. To forget those efforts, intentionally or unintentionally, is a form of silencing. 

To cite just one example, Sri Lankans discovered a mass grave of Tamils in Chemmani, near Jaffna, in early summer 2025. They expressed their outrage and demanded justice. What many did not realize is that investigators had previously discovered evidence of this mass grave over two decades ago, during the successful prosecution of a soldier who participated in the 1996 gang rape and murder of 18-year-old Krishanthi Koomaraswamy. Memory of this trial, including the soldier’s mention of the mass grave in his confession, was suppressed and largely forgotten. 

Building a better future by learning from experience

This brings us to a third and final reason for collecting and publishing data on transitional justice: meliorism, or openness to the possibility that we can make the future better. Keeping the most extensive possible record of prior attempts at accountability can provide practitioners and advocates with experiences on which to build. Our project is called Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools, but we do not seek to control these tools or define their use in evaluation. Our job is to provide data for any efforts at benchmarking, impact assessment, or comparison. After all, no one can learn from experience without information. That is why all our data are open, transparently sourced, and freely available.

Yes, we may be living in a new era of renewed impunity. However, that does not mean that the demand for truth and accountability or information on transitional justice will suddenly vanish. Unless we answer these demands with a shrug. 

Geoff Dancy is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a primary investigator on the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET) project. He is a methodological pluralist who studies human rights discourse, the International Criminal Court, and the impacts of accountability mechanisms.

https://www.openglobalrights.org/the-need-to-press-on-with-human-rights-data-collection/