Let’s Rethink Justice
Rethinking justice
In many regions of Turkey, as in many parts of the world marked by conflict and injustice, the demand for justice has long stood at the center of human rights struggles.
For decades, lawyers, activists, and relatives of victims have fought to ensure that those responsible for killings, enforced disappearances, and other human rights violations do not remain unpunished. Although these legal struggles have often resulted in impunity, they carry profound meaning. Both for victims and for society as a whole,they keep alive the pursuit of truth and justice.
In our fieldwork, when we ask victim families, “What does justice mean to you?”, most give a clear answer: “Justice means that those responsible are held accountable.”
For them, this is not a matter of revenge, but of preventing similar losses from happening again. This expectation invites us to reconsider two dimensions that are often treated as separate in justice debates: the punishment of perpetrators and the healing of society’s wounds. In reality, many families and social actors see accountability as an inseparable starting point for social transformation and peace.
In the Justice Heals project, we depend on this understanding and asked:
- What motivates families to continue their legal struggles despite all obstacles?
- Can justice also mean healing the harm caused and transforming the conditions that produced it?
- How can a holistic approach to justice contribute to building a more democratic and peaceful society?
Human rights and the struggle against impunity
After the Second World War, international law developed global norms of accountability by defining crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. In many parts of the world, victim families and human rights defenders used these tools to fight impunity, at times achieving important gains in courts, truth commissions, or international tribunals.
In Turkey, however, this struggle has repeatedly encountered obstacles such as:
- investigations that never begin or are prematurely closed,
- trials that drag on for years,
- judicial practices that shield perpetrators,
- cases dismissed due to statutes of limitation.
The story told in Hafıza Merkezi’s Dargeçit documentary clearly demonstrates how known perpetrators of the 1990s were able to evade justice through legal maneuvers and networks of political protection. Similar obstacles confronted families seeking justice for children and young people killed in Kurdish provinces during the relative non-conflict period of the 2000s.
Since the 1980s, crimes committed in Kurdish provinces have followed a pattern of continuity. Despite the efforts of lawyers and communities, most have remained unpunished. This impunity not only deepens the pain of families; it also stands as one of the greatest obstacles to lasting peace in Turkey.
Punitive justice and beyond
For most of the families we interviewed, justice begins with punishment with holding accountable those responsible for their children’s deaths. Around the world, punitive justice has formed the backbone of struggles against impunity.
Yet in recent decades, approaches centered solely on punishment have increasingly been questioned by academics, practitioners, and activists from abolitionist perspectives and reformist ones. If the structures that produce injustice remain unchanged, does punishing a few individuals truly bring justice? Can courts alone heal the wounds of decades of violence?
The limits of punitive justice
Courts focus on individual crimes. Yet the roots of human rights violations lie much deeper in political decisions, state structures, and social attitudes. A court ruling may establish a legal truth or provide a formal sense of closure, but it often does not alter the underlying causes of violence.
Even when perpetrators are punished, families continue to carry heavy emotional, social, and economic burdens. Many require psychological support, financial compensation, and assurances that such violence will not recur. Legal victories alone cannot provide these.
Transformative justice
Those who criticize a justice approach “based solely on punishment” emphasize that justice cannot be confined to the courtroom. Justice requires rebuilding trust, dignity, and equality not only for victims, but for society as a whole.
Notably, many of the families we spoke with already share this understanding. Accountability is their first demand. However, they also see justice as a process that can transform the country and prevent future crimes.
The legal arena in a restricted environment
Despite increasing political pressure and shrinking civic space in Turkey since the 2010s, courts remain among the few public arenas where people can still demand truth and justice.
As seen in the Dargeçit and JİTEM trials, even when proceedings do not end in convictions, the trials themselves carry deep meaning for families. Being present in the courtroom, naming perpetrators publicly, and articulating their demands in a formal space constitute both a moral stance and a political claim.
Yet many cases are closed before reaching this stage. Delayed investigations, political interference, and legal loopholes systematically obstruct accountability. Still, families do not abandon their struggle due to moral responsibility to those they lost and believe in the possibility of a more just and peaceful future.
Healing and transformation: Imagining justice and peace
Restorative justice approaches justice not only as punishment, but as healing which means the healing of harm, relationships, and social trust. It asks:
- What do victims and communities need in order to heal?
- What must change to ensure that such violence does not happen again?
This approach became particularly visible with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and later influenced peace processes in countries such as Rwanda and Colombia. In these contexts, truth-telling, recognition, and social healing emerged as complements and sometimes alternatives to traditional punishment.
Why is this important for Turkey?
The concept of restorative justice is not yet well established in Turkey. For many years, the human rights struggle has centered on legal accountability particularly on identifying those responsible for enforced disappearances, torture, and killings. However, thinking about truth and justice together with their broader social and political dimensions and addressing both individual and collective suffering within a horizon of transformation strengthens our resistance against entrenched impunity and expands the scope of our struggle.
Our field research between 2022 and 2025 shows that many families, activists, and communities whether or not they use the term “restorative justice” share this perspective. Many see justice as a long-term process that connects past, present, and future. In other words, it means confronting past injustices, supporting survivors, and building fairer conditions for future generations.
A Justice that heals
A restorative approach recognizes the multilayered harm caused by violence such as emotional trauma, economic loss, and silenced communities. Healing begins when victims can speak, when they are heard, and when their stories are acknowledged in courts, in art, in education, and in public memory.
Teachers, therapists, artists, and local initiatives, together with civil society organizations, lawyers, and activists, become part of a process that rebuilds social bonds.
Limits and tensions
Restorative justice also raises difficult questions.
Can reconciliation include those who caused harm?
When the state officially denies responsibility, are efforts to reintegrate perpetrators or engage in dialogue ethically and politically acceptable?
Most of the families we interviewed oppose amnesty or forgiveness without truth and accountability. For them, peace cannot be built on forgetting. Genuine healing requires political transformation, recognition of the rights of Kurdish citizens and an honest confrontation with the past.
For this reason, many prefer the concept of “transformative justice,” as its aim is not to return to a previously unjust order, but to build a more equal and democratic one.
A fragile hope
As of 2024, renewed contacts between the state and the Kurdish movement have generated a fragile hope for peace. Yet this process remains distant from restorative justice principles,it is top-down, closed to victims’ voices, and avoids accountability.
Still, the families we interviewed remind us of something vital:
Without justice, there can be no peace.
Their stories show that confronting the past and recognizing victims’ suffering are not obstacles for peace, but rather the strongest foundation upon which peace can be built.
