Sometimes writers (philosophers are more often but not uniquely guilty of this) feel compelled to write something that has not been and need not be formalized as if it was highly technical formal language. I just came across an excellent example of this in Robert Meister's After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (which I am currently reviewing, see the precedent post). I will first discuss the pseudo-technical language and then go on to discuss a more substantive problem with Meister's conception of revolutions and transitional justice.
The occurrence of revolution—the belief that it has occurred—means "more of the same" is no longer sufficient to legitimize the future. Between past time (T1) and future time (T2) there will now have been a revolutionary time (TR) that is a special exception to normal time. (TR) interrupts the past and refounds the future by bringing about an irreversible breach between "now" and "then". (...) As an alternative to revolution, transitional justice represents the elongation (perhaps even hypertrophy) of the time (TT) between (T1) and (T2). Transitional justice thus deals with all cases in which (TR) = 0. (pp. 84-85)
First, the whole subscript thing and the final equation are completely unnecessary. The whole passage could and should have been written in standard English. Second, if a revolution is justified, then "more of the same" is not sufficient to make the future legitimate, whether or not the revolution occurs. One can put it even more strongly: the fact that a revolution would be justified is sufficient to assert that a future that is similar to the present in the relevant respects (in those respects that would make the revolution justified) is not a legitimate future, even if the revolution never happens. The example Meister discuss most often in this chapter is South Africa. As it turned out, the apartheid regime wasn't toppled by a revolution, but that doesn't mean that, at any point in time between 1948 and 1994 a future with more of the same, i.e. with a continuing apartheid regime, was legitimate.
Theoretically, one could imagine a society that needs to change, but where the change does not need to be revolutionary (maybe even, where a revolution would not be legitimate). In that case, "more of the same" would be an illegitimate version of the future too. Third, why would the belief that a revolution has occurred mean that "more of the same" is no longer sufficient to legitimize the future? What if the belief was wrong? What if not only the belief was wrong, but a revolution would have not been legitimate at the time?
A more substantive problem
Transitional justice is a set of measures that states implement to redress the legacy of massive human rights abuses. These measures are typically at least partly ad hoc because of (i) practical constraints imposed by the extent and type of the human rights violations in question and (ii) political conditions driving the transition. With respect to (i): Normally, when there have been massive human rights abuses the state, the government, is involved in some way. Often the perpetrators have worked under the orders of the state, often the abuses they perpetrated were not illegal in their country at the time. Sometimes (like in Rwanda) the sheer number of perpetrators would make it impossible for the country to deal with each of them under the system of ordinary criminal justice. Often the new government enacts a new criminal system and the human rights violations that occurred before this new system was enacted cannot be all grandfathered in the system. This is a non exhaustive list.
Transitional justice is necessary, therefore, even if the overthrow of the human rights-violating regime has occurred through a revolution. The equation at the end of the quoted passage above is not only not necessary, it is false. The form transitional justice will take depends on the kind of transition that has occurred. Sometimes, in non-revolutionary transitions (like the ones in Chile, Argentina and Spain in the late seventies and early eighties) the compromises that make the transition possible (the political conditions listed as (ii) above) limit the scope of institutions of transitional justice (through deals that provide immunity to members of the security forces, for example). It is reasonable to expect that revolutionary transitions might allow for a wider scope in the prosecution of human rights violations committed during previous administrations. However that may be, and for a series of very practical reasons, a revolutionary government will most probably need to set up measures and institutions to deal with massive human rights violations. These measures and institutions need, for a set of practical reasons, to be ad hoc, different from the normal system of criminal and civil justice. This is what transitional justice is all about.
