GUERNICA CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE
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Mission Statement
The Guernica Centre for International Justice partners with communities and key civil society actors in different countries to design and implement context-oriented strategies for meaningful and transformative accountability for human rights violations and international crimes. We listen to the communities and spend the necessary time to develop a contextual understanding of their claims in dialogue with them; then we act accordingly. The Guernica Centre is part of The Guernica Group. We are a group of practitioners that came together after years of involvement in accountability efforts sharing a common perception: the relatively scarce results on accountability could be attributed to having, on the one side, lawyers with little or no interaction with the communities they aim to help; and, on the other, advocates with limited practical investigative and lawyering skills. As we felt that the field as a whole was facing a human rights accountability crisis, we decided that a new approach was necessary to raise effectiveness and secure concrete results. We constantly study and learn from past and current efforts. Practitioners, organizations, communities and individuals around the world have made extraordinary efforts in the up-hill quest for human rights accountability. Nonetheless, we also are painfully aware that many advances are not sustained and resistance to accountability efforts continues to be ubiquitous. The Guernica Centre wants to do more to understand all that is at play in these processes by testing and transforming the methodologies that have been developed in the field over the last twenty years. Although we have fought against impunity and have achieved some measures of justice, the experiences of backsliding in this field led us to seek a new approach to identify alternatives that we and our partners can implement going forward.
About This Cause
In its pursuit of accountability, the Guernica Centre focuses on situations that reflect organizational wrongdoing and complex patterns of perpetration that involve sources of private and public power in planning, committing or covering-up egregious conduct. These cases and situations put traditional conceptions of legal and political responsibility to the test, in part, because: • Violence occurs over an extended period of time, and involves multifarious structures that often have become normalized; • Active dynamics of repression, coercive violence and fear restrict citizen mobilization and facilitate the denial of atrocities and responsibility; • The complexity of the pattern of misconduct is not adequately addressed by the aggregation of individual responsibility; • The harm and damages goes beyond individual incidents and have collective dimensions and repercussions; and • The offending parties often remain powerful enough to hinder the operation of traditional democratic controls (for example the press or independent systems of justice).