The Justice Heals website was designed within the scope of the three-year project titled “Justice Heals: A Holistic Approach to Violations of the Right to Life of Children and Youth,” carried out by Hafıza Merkezi between 2022 and 2025. The project was implemented with the support of the European Union.

Justice Heals focuses on children and young people whose right to life was violated in Kurdish provinces in Turkey between 2000 and 2015, as well as on the justice-seeking processes that followed these losses. The time frame addressed by the project points to a distinct political context that can be described as “neither war nor peace”: a period in which open armed conflict in the Kurdish issue relatively decreased, yet the security-oriented paradigm shaped in the 1990s remained intact, preventing the institutionalization of peace.

Hafıza Merkezi was founded in 2011, at a time when expectations were relatively strong that Turkey might confront the legacy of severe violence and impunity of the 1990s and cross a democratic threshold. In its early years, our documentation work focused particularly on the crime of enforced disappearance within the broader context of state violence against Kurdish citizens. These efforts were guided by a transitional justice perspective grounded in the assumption that confronting the past could open the way for democratization in Turkey.

However, after 2015, the rapid authoritarian turn in the political climate, the shrinking of civic space, and the re-emergence of past patterns of violations in new forms demonstrated that this “transition” horizon was gradually losing its meaning. Under these conditions, as Hafıza Merkezi, we began to focus on how to sustain the struggle for justice without relying on expectations of institutional transformation in an increasingly authoritarian environment. This search enabled us to rethink our documentation activities through the process-oriented principles of restorative and transformative justice, and to approach justice not merely as an outcome, but as a practice grounded in social relations, recognition, and repair.

Drawing on this experience, the Justice Heals website was designed as a framework for collectively reflecting on the social conditions that make justice possible. We sought to address the struggle for justice across different dimensions: making the truth of violations visible and opening space to discuss what kind of justice we envision in response to these violations. For this reason, the website is structured under two main headings:

Why Justice Matters?

This section aims to make visible the patterns of gross human rights violations that have occurred in different periods in Turkey, their impact on victims and their relatives, and the ongoing demands for justice. You can access our documentation work, databases, and publications on different areas of violations here.

Rethinking Justice

This section opens a discussion on the potential of restorative and transformative justice approaches to heal wounds, create space for social recovery, and imagine a more just future. It brings together recent news, resources, and inspiring examples related to the search for justice.