Book Review: Transitional Justice: Contending with the Past
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211013475 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Bill Bowring |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
instructive in this work and creative in the new paths of apprehension, examination and
analysis that it sets us on.
KATHRYN MCNEILLY
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
ORCID iD
Kathryn McNeilly https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9488-2232
Note
References
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French R (2001) Time in the law. University of Colorado Law Review 72(3): 663–748.
Grabham E (2016) Brewing Legal Time: Things, Form, and the Enactment of Law. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Greenhouse C (1989) Just in time: Temporality and the cultural legitimation of law. The Yale Law
Journal 98(8): 1631–1651.
Keenan S (2013) Property as governance: Time, space and belonging in Australia’s Northern
Territory Intervention. Modern Law Review 76(3): 464–493.
McNeilly K (2019) Are rights out of time? International human rights law, temporality, and radical
social change. Social and Legal Studies 28(6): 817–838.
Mawani R (2014) Law as temporality: Colonial politics and Indian settlers. UC Irvine Law Review
4(1): 65–96.
Tur R (2002) Time and law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 22(3): 463–488.
MICHAEL NEWMAN, Transitional Justice: Contending with the Past.Cambridge: Polity, 2019, pp. 204,
ISBN 9781509521166, £15.99 (pbk).
The story told by Newman starts in South Africa in the 1990s. The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established by the Promotion of National
Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, and was based in Cape Town. This
reviewer can claim some familiarity with this topic: he had been an observer, in
Johannesburg, at the first free elections in South Africa in April 1994, and met Nelson
Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
The TRC hearings started in 1996 and the second volume of its findings was published
in 2003. The mandate of the commission was to bear witness to, record, and in some cases
grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, as well as
offering reparation and rehabilitation to the victims. The TRC found that more than
19,050 people had been victims of gross human rights violations under apartheid. An
additional 2,975 victims were identified through the applications for amnesty. In report-
ing these numbers, the TRC voiced its regret that there was very little overlap of victims
962 Social & Legal Studies 30(6)
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