Transitional Justice, International Law and the UN

What relationship does international law have to transitional justice and what role has the United Nations played in shaping that relationship?
The international legal history of this concept reveals that the UN has shifted from relying on international law to support nationally determined transitional justice efforts to expecting States to conform to a growing body of international legal standards it has set in this field, writes LEENA GROVER in the Nordic Journal of International Law.
“This turn to international legal hegemony and UN managerialism can marginalize some of the most pressing concerns of people attempting to overcome past large-scale abuses.”
In recent years, the UN has expanded its work in transitioning societies and scholars have recommended ways for better addressing the needs of their members, GROVER writes in her research article titled ‘Transitional Justice, International Law and the United Nations’.
However, these measures seem partial at best, as they disrupt neither international law’s hegemony nor the UN’s managerial role in this field, which operate as major constraints on societies weighing their transitional justice options.
“Today, it is difficult to conceive of transitional justice without reference to the thick normative framework established by the UN and embedded in international law,” GROVER states.
To be sure, this regime has made many positive contributions to transitioning societies, supporting justice initiatives that would perhaps not be possible otherwise owing inter alia to legal barriers, limited resources or a lack of political will.
However, this regime contains a hierarchy of interests and does not overtly admit normative contestation. As a result, citizens are constrained in selecting transitional justice responses or else select responses that fall outside of this regime and are therefore not captured by it.
This regime also reflects a particular understanding of transitional justice that diminishes the role of national legal and political orders and assumes the need for international involvement in a normative sense, implicitly regarding transitioning societies and its members as unable or unwilling to conceive of transitional justice themselves.
Normative expansion, when it occurs, is regime-specific and depends on experts within it to do this work, the author states. “But where does the greatest normative expansion originate from if not the needs and imaginations of individuals in transitioning societies?”
If this is the case, is the answer to strengthen this international regime and give it the tools to catch up with developments on the ground in a conceptually authentic manner? Or is there another way forward?