For the longest time the two transitional justice bodies, as provided in the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), could not be formed as there could be no agreement between the mainstream political parties and the Maoist party over post-conflict management of the Maoist militia. The pair of commissions was supposed to be formed within six months of the signing of the CPA; it took nine years before they, eventually, came into existence in early 2015. Even after such a tardy start, they have in the past one year had a rocky ride. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission for Investigation of Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) were rendered dysfunctional for 11 months after their formation as the government failed to draft regulations to govern them. Now, even with the requisite regulations in place, the process of granting justice to thousands of families of those killed or forcibly made to disappear is still likely to be long and arduous. These things take time, even under the most favorable circumstances. And the conditions in Nepal have been far from satisfactory.Recently, the two commissions set a goal of starting detailed investigations on the complaints they receive by mid-June. Preliminary investigations, meanwhile, will start from the time a complaint is received. In case of the commission on disappearances, when it gets a complaint, it will first verify whether the complaints are related to the Maoist insurgency. If they are related, it will then send its officials to the homes of victim families and get them to fill up its detailed ante-mortem form, it will then record the statements of families and witnesses, and then, when necessary, there will be exhumations, followed by DNA testing. In the next step, if the commission finds someone guilty of grave rights violations, it will write to the attorney general for legal action. It does not end there. Since the attorney general has a lot of discretion over whether or not to hold someone recommended for legal action responsible for their alleged crime, there could be another lengthy delay to establish the truth. In fact, if international transitional justice mechanisms are any guide, a single case could take four or five years to settle. Thus the two-year timeframe given to the two bodies is extremely ambitious.
It does not help that international rights bodies, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have raised serious objections with Nepal's transitional justice. This is why it is important that the two bodies maintain a high level of transparency in all their undertakings and regularly communicate about their work. To have credibility, there will have to be at least a few successful persecutions of grave rights violators. But who do they punish and who do they let off the hook? How can people believe that local peace committees which will initially investigate complaints are acting impartially? And what happens to outstanding cases when the two-year timeframe (plus, at the most, one year of extension) of the TRC and the CIEDP ends? It is good to be ambitious. In fact, it would be wonderful if the victim families, who have already been made to wait for a decade, could get justice and a sense of closure soon. Our concern is that in the hurry to finish everything early, justice itself might be compromised. The two bodies have a tough job on their hands.
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