Human Rights Discourse and Transitional Justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Introduction: The revival of transitional justice
For more than three decades, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has endured recurrent armed conflicts and mass atrocities, particularly in its eastern provinces. Domestic prosecutions, international criminal proceedings, peace agreements, disarmament programmes and successive institutional reforms have produced important but fragmented gains. None has matched the scale and duration of the violations, delivered an effective remedy to most victims or prevented the recurrence of violence.
Against this background and after failed attempts with the defunct Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003-2007), transitional justice re-emerged as a national policy project with Félix Tshisekedi’s accession to power. In August 2020, he instructed the Government to place transitional justice on its agenda. The initiative coincided with the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Mapping Report, continued atrocities, growing mobilisation by victims and civil society, and renewed advocacy for a comprehensive response to impunity, including the memorandum submitted by Dr Denis Mukwege, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient, known famously for his medical role in treating victims of conflict-related sexual violence in the eastern DRC. Transitional justice then entered the conclusions of the broad presidential consultations held with political and social forces in November 2020. In his address of 6 December 2020, the President endorsed recourse to transitional justice instruments as part of a wider response to peace and security that also included criminal accountability, assistance to victims, memorialisation and security-sector reform.
That political commitment was followed by a distinct and more specialised policy process. From late 2021 onward, the Ministry of Human Rights organised consultations on transitional justice in several provinces. These consultations focused specifically on victims’ and affected communities’ expectations regarding truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. In October 2022, the Government, with the support of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office, established a mixed scientific committee of government and independent experts, chaired by Emmanuel-Janvier Luzolo Bambi, to consolidate the consultation findings and formulate a national policy. The committee submitted its report and draft National Transitional Justice Policy in January 2023, and the Government adopted the policy in May 2025.
The emerging architecture also includes Law No. 22/065 of 26 December 2022 on the protection and reparation of victims of conflict-related sexual violence and crimes against the peace and security of humanity, the National Reparations Fund (FONAREV), and the Inter-Institutional Commission for Assistance to Victims and Support for Reforms (CIA-VAR). These developments do not yet constitute a complete or fully operational transitional justice system. They nevertheless mark a shift from dispersed initiatives towards a national framework capable of linking criminal accountability, truth-seeking, reparations, institutional reform, memory and reconciliation.
This article argues that human rights law supplies both the legal foundation and the limiting discipline of the transitional justice framework. It identifies victims as rights-holders and defines the obligations owed to them: investigation and prosecution, truth, an effective remedy and reparation, and prevention of recurrence. Transitional justice translates those obligations into a context-specific architecture of institutions, procedures, sequencing and participation. Human rights law thus determines what must be delivered; transitional justice organises how, by whom, at which level and with which safeguards it can be delivered in a society affected by widespread and recurrent violations. The sections below apply this argument to truth, justice, reparations, institutional reform and memory.
Breaking the Silence around Crimes
Human rights law frames truth as a right, not as a political concession. The right to truth requires the establishment of facts, the identification of victims, perpetrators and patterns of responsibility, the search for disappeared persons, the preservation of archives and the public disclosure of violations, subject to the protection of victims, witnesses and survivors. The 2005 United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation link this requirement to measures of satisfaction, including verification of facts, full and public disclosure of the truth, the search for the disappeared, official apologies, commemorations and sanctions. The African Union Transitional Justice Policy similarly insists on independent, inclusive and victim-centred truth-seeking processes capable of identifying the causes, circumstances, patterns and responsibilities underlying mass atrocities.
In the DRC, serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, particularly in the eastern provinces, have been the subject of countless testimonies, State inquiries, reports by national and international NGOs and United Nations documentation. Yet the right to truth cannot be achieved through documentation alone. It requires the transformation of documented truth into publicly acknowledged truth, including through credible truth-seeking mechanisms. The ‘fiasco’ of the 2003–2007 Truth and Reconciliation Commission showed that a truth commission designed as an elite compromise, in a context dominated by former belligerents, cannot effectively fulfil that function. Truth-seeking mechanisms must be independent, accessible, contextualised, territorially grounded and followed by concrete consequences. The provincialisation of truth-seeking, as attempted in Kasai, despite its weaknesses during its first mandate, remains promising insofar as it adapts truth recovery to the geography, causes and local expectations surrounding violence.
Pluralising Access to Justice
Human rights standards require%20Investigate%20violations%20effectively%2C%20promptly%2C%20thoroughly%20and%20impartially%20and%2C%20where%20appropriate%2C%20take%20action%20against%20those%20allegedly%20responsible%20in%20accordance%20with%20domestic%20and%20international%) the State to investigate serious violations, prosecute those responsible and guarantee victims an effective remedy. They also require justice to comply with fundamental guarantees: judicial independence, rights of the defence, presumption of innocence, equality of arms and protection of victims and witnesses. In the Congolese context, national courts, especially military courts, have regularly dealt with international crimes and have produced significant case law on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Yet national prosecutions remain insufficient in light of the scale of violations. They are also dependent on external funding, weakened by insecurity, political pressure, inadequate defence guarantees and difficulties in protecting victims. The International Criminal Court has also contributed to the fight against impunity in the DRC, but its contribution remains limited due, among other things, to its temporal jurisdiction, since it can only adjudicate crimes committed after July 2002, whereas several crimes, including those listed in the United Nations Mapping Report, were committed before that date; and by its substantive jurisdiction, since it can only adjudicate human rights violations that amount to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or the crime of aggression.
Cyclical and grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law generate a demand for justice that ordinary courts alone cannot satisfy. Moreover, criminal justice for international crimes is largely structured around the responsibility of commanders and superiors. It necessarily focuses on those most responsible, while many direct and indirect perpetrators remain outside the reach of prosecution. International criminal justice cannot prosecute everyone and should not pretend to do so. This reality calls for complementary justice mechanisms capable of contributing to truth, recognition, social repair and the restoration of community relations, while consolidating the gains of formal adjudication. Such plurality is recognised by the African Union Transitional Justice Policy, provided that restorative or community-based mechanisms comply with fundamental human rights guarantees.
Repairing to Transform
International (human rights) standards recognise victims’ right to an adequate, effective and prompt remedy and reparation. The 2005 United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines, as well as Law No. 22/065 on reparations, make clear that reparation is not limited to compensation. It also includes restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition. When seized of international crimes, Congolese courts also award damages to victims as civil parties. Yet access to those awards remains largely ineffective. Victims seeking enforcement encounter legal, institutional, financial and practical obstacles. FONAREV therefore represents an important development, both as a mechanism to support victims in recovering court-awarded reparations and as a vehicle for extrajudicial reparations within a broader pluralisation of justice architecture.
Classically, the law is guided by the principle of restitutio in integrum, according to which reparation should, as far as possible, erase the consequences of the wrongful act and restore the situation that would likely have existed had the act not occurred. In contexts of mass atrocities, the gravity and scale of violations make a simple return to the status quo ante impossible. Human rights discourse therefore supports transformative reparations as a tool for rebuilding deeply harmed societies. Reparation should not return victims to a prior condition already marked by poverty, exclusion or abandonment. It should restore dignity and address the structures that made violence possible. As the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights General Comment No.4 has affirmed, reparation must generate changes in social, economic and political structures and relationships (para 8).
Reforming Institutions and Societies
International standards make non-repetition an obligation. The right to guarantees of non-repetition requiresStates to ensure that victims do not suffer the same violations again. Often understood as part of the right to reparation, non-repetition entails institutional reforms and broader measures capable of restoring the rule of law, fostering a culture of respect for human rights and rebuilding public trust in institutions. This includes, first and foremost, the removal of perpetrators of serious violations from sensitive public functions through vetting, lustration or administrative screening.
However, the record of reforms undertaken in the DRC so far is not encouraging. The failures of vetting processes and demobilisation programmes are particularly striking. When former combatants receive assistance while victims remain unrepaired, or when former warlords obtain political and institutional rewards, communities may reasonably conclude that taking up arms opens access to benefits, while victimhood leads to abandonment. Moreover, reforms have too often targeted institutions without sufficiently engaging the societies that sustain, experience or distrust them. They have also focused mainly on State institutions, although local justice and security ecosystems are plural. Human rights logic therefore points toward a bottom-up transitional justice model grounded in the effective participation of affected communities. This approach, consistent with human rights standards and promoted by the African Union Transitional Justice Policy, can help build a form of legal pluralism rooted in dignity, equality, participation and accountability.
Preventing Erasure
Memory is now recognised as a pillar of transitional justice. Human rights standards view memorialisation as a tool of recognition, prevention of denial, resistance to hate speech and transmission of past violence. It requires archives, commemorations, public narratives, memorial sites and education capable of transforming suffering into collective consciousness. In the DRC, this requirement has received legal recognition. Article 28 of Law No. 22/065 on reparations establishes 2 August as a National Day of Tribute to victims of conflict-related sexual violence and victims of crimes against the peace and security of humanity, known as “Genocost”. It also provides for tribute to those who assisted victims and for the creation of commemorative and memorial sites.
The DRC already has forms of memory work, including local initiatives, community narratives and demands for monuments. These initiatives matter but remain insufficient. Many victims still live with unidentified dead, unprotected mass graves, unrecognised massacre sites and contested narratives of violence. A human rights-based memory policy must therefore avoid two risks: official amnesia and selective memory. It must document violations, protect sites, identify the disappeared, support local initiatives and integrate the history of violence into education. This is particularly important in the DRC, where the boundary between the State and former belligerents is often blurred, as in many post-conflict societies, due to the integration of former combatants into State institutions or their continuing influence over certain regions. Memory must not become an instrument of political legitimation. It must remain a space of recognition, dignity and prevention.
Conclusion
Serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the DRC have generated a demand for justice that neither peace rhetoric nor political settlements can satisfy alone. Responding to these violations requires a human rights-based approach capable of imposing legal obligations on the State: recognising victims as rights-holders, establishing responsibility, repairing harm, preserving memory and preventing recurrence.