An Analysis of Transitional Justice Terminology in UN General Assembly Speeches (1971-2015)

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Each year, a top-level representative from every member state of the United Nations addresses the General Assembly in New York summarizing national policy objectives and major accomplishments.
How have they attended to the issue of transitional justice, i.e., the ways in which countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large-scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response?
In search for answers, MICHAEL LAHANAS went through UN General Assembly speeches from every member state from 1971 to 2015. He divided the dataset into a variety of different regional and political combinations that reflect historical alliances, rivalries, and interests of major nations and then entered terms relating to transitional justice as well as human rights.
“While some terms showed up rarely, the times they did were closely tied with the socio-political history of the countries that mentioned them,” LAHANAS says.
“As I suspected, Western democracies led the pack with more frequent mentions of terms like human rights, and rule of law. Meanwhile, countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, and Cuba tended to mention sovereignty more often – a hint at their more unique foreign policy agendas. Curiously, justice was also one that was mentioned far more often by this cluster of countries.”
Sanctions were also close behind this language, more heavily for some countries that are subject to them than others. Additionally, there has been a significant uptick in the use of some transitional justice terminology in the late 1990s.
“Unfortunately, a great many terms specific to the burgeoning field of transitional justice remain unmentioned in General Assembly speeches,” LAHANAS says. “This does not, however, mean that they are being neglected by international diplomats – presumably they are being discussed in different settings at the UN.”
Still, the fact that some are being used at all, and can be traced to countries with a historical relationship to transitional justice mechanisms means that this dataset remains a rich resource for scholars to understand trends in diplomatic language over the last forty years, he says.