My First Two Assignments
I was given my first two research assignment this week. The first one is a long-term assignment on transitional justice in North African states. My supervisor is currently conducting research for an African Union policy framework on Transitional Justice in Africa (ATJF). The framework is intended to serve as a guide that can be applied to post-conflict or transitioning states in their pursuit of sustainable peace, justice, and reconciliation. I’ve been asked to type up individual reports on North African states (Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya), outlining the current transitional justice mechanisms in each. I started working on and finished my first draft on the transitional justice mechanisms in Algeria following the coup d’état and the civil war. The most prevalent mechanism used by the state has been amnesty and clemency (most of which have been very one-sided and more favorable state perpetrators of human rights violations than those associated with terrorist organizations), with limited compensation to the families of the disappeared. I will be revising my first draft and submitting my final report on Algeria sometime next week. I can’t wait to start my reports on the Arab Spring states: Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Based on what I have found so far, there seems to be very little written on the three countries, which makes the CSVR’s work imperative. For my second assignment, I was asked to do a background research on existing studies on sexual gender based violence (SGBV) in Burundi and the Great Lakes region of Africa. I was asked to write a report summarizing the objective of each study and submit my first draft by Friday morning.