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3 - Sending the Wrong Signal

International Assistance and the Decline of Civil Society Action on Transitional Justice in Morocco

from Part I - Understanding the Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2018

Paige Arthur
Affiliation:
New York University
Christalla Yakinthou
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the EU’s funding for the much-discussed community reparations program—an innovative attempt to deal with the collective harms of massive human rights violations that operated from 2007 to 2011. The program was run by a state body, the Moroccan National Human Rights Council. Groups from affected regions in Morocco could apply through a competitive process for small-scale funds to support community-level initiatives. Analysis of this unique financing structure led to the finding that when donor funds are channeled largely to official or state institutions—as the funds for the community reparations program were—this act may implicitly legitimize the state’s own approach to TJ and delegitimize civil society actors’ key roles as both interlocutors and counterweights to the state. Indeed, civil society actors were quite critical of the community reparations program; instead, they supported what they saw as more meaningful but more politically sensitive issues like dealing with impunity for past crimes. Situating the community reparations program in the larger context of TJ in Morocco, Arthur finds that although a vibrant set of civil society actors (including the national victims’ organization) had previously been the driving force behind TJ, civil society collaboration on TJ declined after the close of the Moroccan Truth and Equity Commission in 2006, and it remains quite weak today. In general, the Morocco case study suggests that TJ in itself does not enhance cooperation and social capital of organizations, nor has international assistance contributed to such enhancement. In retrospect, therefore, it might have been a positive move for the EU to complement its support for the state-run community reparations program with specific support for civil society actors either to engage with and monitor the program, or to pursue their own TJ-related initiatives, even if these were not linked to the state’s (and the National Human Rights Council’s) approach to TJ.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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