I. NATIONAL CONSULTATIONS: WHAT THEY ARE AND WHY THEY MATTER In 2004, the United Nations Secretary-General defined “transitional justice” as comprising “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation”. In addition, he emphasized that, in the context of transitional justice, strategies must be “holistic, incorporating integrated attention to individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or an appropriately conceived combination thereof”.1 Whatever combination is chosen must be in conformity with international legal standards and obligations. Transitional justice should seek to examine more comprehensively the root causes of conflicts and the related violations of all human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights as well as civil and political rights. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has pointed out, “transitional justice must have the ambition of assisting the transformation of oppressed societies into free ones by addressing the injustices of the past through measures that will procure an equitable future. It must reach to, but also beyond, the crimes and abuses committed during the conflict which led to the transition, into the human rights violations that pre-existed the conflict and caused or contributed to it.”2 For transitional justice efforts to be effective, they must be grounded in international human rights standards. Above all, they must be human rights-based: consistently focusing on the rights and needs of victims and their families. A human rights-based approach to transitional justice demands that programmes should be designed in a context of in-depth consultation with affected communities. The Commission on Human Rights, in its resolution 2005/70, stressed “the importance of a comprehensive process of national consultation, particularly with those affected by human rights violations, in contributing to a holistic transitional justice strategy that takes into account the particular circumstances of every situation and in conformity with international human rights standards.” The Secretary-General has said that “the most successful transitional justice experiences owe a large part of their success to the quality and quantity of public and victim consultation carried out.”3 In January 2005, the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, applied these insights to the specific context of Afghanistan when, speaking in Kabul, she praised the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission “for its remarkable efforts in conducting these 1 “Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies” (S/2004/616, paras. 8 and 26). 2 Louise Arbour, “Economic and social justice for societies in transition”, Second Annual Transitional Justice Lecture hosted by the New York University School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and by the International Center for Transitional Justice (New York, 25 October 2006). 3 S/2004/616, para. 16. 1