Hun Joon Kim

The Turn to Truth: Trends in Truth Commission Experimentation

Interest in cross-national comparison of transitional justice mechanisms has grown recently, as has the study of truth commissions in particular. However, as is true of many emerging areas of research, progress has been hampered by significant gaps in data and by a lack of consensus as to what constitutes the universe of cases. To address this problem, this article introduces the most comprehensive truth commission database we know to be in existence. First, we describe the process of collecting information on truth commission cases and outline our logic in determining what cases to include in the database. Then, we briefly discuss the attributes of truth commission cases included in the database and explain our reasoning regarding their inclusion. Finally, we use the data to provide an overview of patterns and trends in the use of truth commissions.

Structural determinants of human rights prosecutions after democratic transition

Over the last three decades, a growing number of countries have experienced a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, and the new governments have been increasingly expected to address past human rights violations. While the academic literature on the impact of human rights prosecution is relatively well developed, the literature on the causes of such prosecution is still sparse. Why do states pursue criminal prosecutions against former state officials on the charge of human rights violations? This article answers this question by testing three key theories: the balance of power between old and new elites, transnational advocacy networks, and the diffusion theory. I conduct a cross-national study of 71 countries that were in a state of democratic transitions between 1980 and 2006, using a new dataset on domestic human rights prosecutions. I find strong evidence to support the transnational advocacy networks and diffusion explanations. First, active domestic and international human rights advocacy for individual criminal accountability is a key factor guaranteeing persistent and frequent human rights prosecutions. My study further shows that domestic advocacy plays a crucial role in criminal prosecutions of high-profile state officials while international pressure is more effective in promoting prosecutions of low-profile officials. Second, the diffusion theory is also supported since the occurrence of human rights prosecution in neighboring countries is a relevant factor. Interestingly, transitional countries are most sensitive to trials occurring in culturally or linguistically similar countries and this supports the constructivist norm diffusion theory, which focuses on the role of identity and communication in the diffusion process. However, I find that the power balance explanation, which has been the prevailing explanation, is valid only for the immediate use of human rights prosecutions.

Local, National, and International Determinants of Truth Commission: The South Korean Experience

In recent years, the number of truth commissions in countries around the world has continued to increase, and their scope and functions have become much broader. There is, however, still a need for a comprehensive theoretical framework that will enable scholars to explain the truth commission phenomenon. In this article, I will outline a new theoretical framework that combines social movement theory and transnational advocacy networks theory. I will then apply this framework to the South Korean truth commission experience, and analyze in detail the process that enabled local activists to successfully push for the creation of the first South Korean truth commission in 2000. Based on the South Korean case, I find that, first of all, important national and international factors would not have come into play if not for the persistent struggle of local activists. Second, I find that local activists were able to make optimal use of these national and international opportunity structures to pursue their goals through various timely and effective strategies.

Political Legitimacy in South Korea

Since Korea was forced to open its doors to Japan in 1876, Korean politics has been a microcosm of global developments. Currently, it remains the only place in the world where Cold War and post-Cold War political systems coexist. The Cold War between the USSR and the Western powers that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did not end the cold war between communist North Korea and democratic South Korea. Since Germany and Yemen each became unified, the two Koreas remain the only two countries in the world referred to by their polar direction. Historically, the modern politics of the two Koreas has been marked by the collapse of the Joseon dynasty, Japanese colonialism, both Soviet and U.S. military occupation, sundry riots and revolutions, the Korean War, dictatorship and authoritarianism, coups, repression and massacres, and, most recently, democratization. Remarkably, all these events occurred within the past hundred years, suggesting that the political legitimacy of the modern South Korean state might be resting on shaky ground.

Transitional Justice in the Asia-Pacific: Introduction

THE QUESTION OF HOW THE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS OF previous regimes and past periods of conflict ought to be addressed is one of the most pressing concerns facing governments and policy makers today. New democracies and states in the fragile post-conflict peace-settlement phase are confronted by the need to make crucial decisions about whether to hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable for their actions and, if so, the mechanisms they ought to employ to best achieve that end. Since the 1980s, posttransitional states have increasingly opted in favour of accountability for human rights violations and have used a wide range of measures from prosecutions and punishment to truth telling, lustration of police and security forces, reparations, and judicial reforms, to reconciliation processes, apologies, forgiveness ceremonies, exhumations and reburials, memorialization projects, traditional and indigenous justice practices, and other guarantees of non-repetition.1 In doing so, they have contributed to the emergence of what has variously been termed ‘the justice cascade’ or as a ‘revolution in accountability.’2

Introduction to the Review Symposium on Kathryn Sikkink's The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics

The question of how the human rights violations of previous regimes and past periods of conflict ought to be addressed is one of the most pressing concerns facing governments and policymakers today. New democracies and states in the fragile post-peace-settlement phase are confronted by the need to make crucial decisions about whether to hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable for their actions and, if so, the mechanisms they ought to employ to best achieve that end. Since the 1980s, post-transitional states have increasingly opted in favor of accountability for human rights violations and have used a wide range of measures such as prosecution, truth-telling, lustration of police and security forces, reparations, judicial reform, exhumations and reburials, memorialization, and other guarantees of nonrepetition (Roht-Arriaza 2002: 97). The recent wave of democratization and armed conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa suggests that this new tendency will continue in the twenty-first century. Around the world, states increasingly use international, foreign, and domestic human rights trials to hold individuals criminally accountable for past human rights violations. This new trend is reflected in the work the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) and in the foreign universal jurisdiction cases like the trials of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile in Spain and the United Kingdom. But the change is not limited to these high-profile international tribunals and foreign cases. The great bulk of enforcement of core human rights norms now occurs in domestic courts using a combination of domestic criminal law and international human rights law. In The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, Kathryn Sikkink calls this trend “the justice cascade” and argues that it represents a new and surprising development in world politics because it challenges classic understandings of sovereignty and the immunity of state officials from prosecution. Over the last two decades, Kathryn Sikkink has been working intensively on the topics of human rights (Sikkink 1993, 2004; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999), international