ANECDOTE

The elder peasant listens carefully to my explanation. I am talking about the Victims and Land Restitution Law. This law, I am saying, has created, among other things, a new legal action and process designed to guarantee the land restitution right of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who are victims of land seizures and forced abandonment in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. I am trying to expose the characteristics, benefits, and innovations of this transitional justice mechanism. These features, alongside their comparison with ordinary legal actions and processes, seem not to persuade the elder peasant and he is skeptical of my reasoning. I try to convince him by describing how this new law will benefit him by incorporating international human rights standards regarding the rights of victims of gross human rights violations and international humanitarian law breaches. I remark, using the rhetoric of transitional justice, how his right to truth, justice, and reparation with guarantees of non-recurrence can be satisfied by this new process. Nevertheless, he is not persuaded at all, and after taking a breath, he raises his hand and interrupts me by saying: “Here in Colombia one law replaces another law, and then another new law replaces that law; our reality is made out of laws and laws, but in the end there is no law at all.”

INTRODUCTION

The rustic wisdom of the peasant points to one of the main dilemmas of transitional justice adjudication. His words contain two claims. On the one hand, he implies that the process by which a new law is created to replace another law is indicative of a context of “no law”, a context in which the Rule of Law can be undermined by the instability of the legal framework and by uncertainty regarding the applicable law, or what to do when old and new laws collide. On the other hand, his skepticism refers to the incapability of law exercised by the judiciary to actually produce desirable consequences in his reality. He has been disappointed by the law several times: it failed him when his rights were violated and his land seized; and it failed him when his claims were dismissed and his rights remained unprotected.