Non-recurrence, reconciliation, and transitional justice: situating accountability in Northern Ireland’s oral history archive

ABSTRACT

Guarantees of non-recurrence remain a complex component of transitional justice. Tasked with ensuring that past traumas are not re-enacted, post-conflict states typically focus on dismantling security forces or paramilitary sectors that participated in conflict violence. This fulfils the state’s judicial responsibilities by condemning what is often the most visible sign of conflict: large-scale violence and human rights abuses. Other organisational entities are also capable of facilitating movements toward preventing the reoccurrence of armed conflict. In this regard, archives are uniquely positioned to engage with aspects of non-recurrence mechanisms and have the potential to encourage bottom-up community engagement while broadening the scope of transitional justice work. Using Northern Ireland’s proposed Oral History Archive (OHA) as a case study, this paper first untangles the intricacies of non-recurrence as an enigmatic aspect of transitional justice and reconciliation as a cornerstone of the OHA’s archival constructs. It then offers the concept of archival accountability as a better suited architecture for the OHA which could subsequently integrate community-based practices into this particular transitional justice setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Guarantees of non-recurrence
• reconciliation
• archival accountability
• Northern Ireland
• community archives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 CAIN’s section entitled ‘Remembering: Victims, Survivors, and Commemoration’, which documents individuals killed during the Troubles and related details, is, according to Dirk Schubotz et al., a ‘reminder that the role of the archivist in Northern Ireland itself is political and therefore contested as it operates in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict and the segregated Northern Irish society’. See Dirk Schubotz et al., ‘Archiving Qualitative Data in the Context of a Society Coming out of Conflict: Some Lessons from Northern Ireland’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 3 (2011).

2 See Rory Carroll, ‘“Academic Vandalism”—Unique Archive of the Troubles under Threat’, The Guardian, April 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/30/academic-vandalism-unique-archive-troubles-northern-ireland-under-threat.

3 ‘In the intervening period, the “top-down” (official) process of dealing with the legacy of past violence has been piecemeal and incremental … More recent attempts to develop a comprehensive framework to address the legacies of the past, including truth recovery processes, have repeatedly fallen foul of the conflictual relationships and ideological differences between the main political parties, and the reluctance of the British and Irish governments to agree to full transparency in relation to their role in the conflict.’ Brandon Hamber and Gráinne Kelly, ‘Practice, Power and Inertia: Personal Narrative, Archives and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 8, no. 1 (2016): 29.

4 Ibid., 32.

5 Benjamin Majangwa and Sean Byrne, ‘Peacebuilding and Reconciliation through Storytelling in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of the Republic of Ireland’, Storytelling, Self, Society 11, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 85–110.

6 Northern Ireland Office. Stormont House Agreement, (23 December 2014), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/390672/Stormont_House_Agreement.pdf, p. 5.

7 The SHA simply states that ‘the Executive will, by 2016, establish an Oral History Archive … ’. See SHA, p. 5.

8 Transitional justice schemes redress human rights abuses through judicial and non-judicial methods of (re)establishing trust, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence. See United Nations Commission on Human Rights, ‘Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity’, (2015), E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1.

9 SHA, p. 5.

10 Kieran McEvoy, ‘Travel, Dilemmas and Nonrecurrence: Observations on the “Respectabilisation” of Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 12 (2018): 185–93.

11 Michelle Anderson, ‘Community-Based Transitional Justice via the Creation and Consumption of Digitized Storytelling Archive’s: A Case Study of Belfast’s Prisons Memory Archive’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 13 (2019): 30–49.

12 Pablo de Greiff, ‘Theorizing Transitional Justice’, in Transitional Justice, eds. Melissa Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster (New York University Press, 2012), 31–77.

13 Michelle Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives: Accountability, Truth, and Memory in Cambodia’, Archival Science 10, no. 1 (2010): 25–44.

14 The threat of unease is reflected throughout Northern Ireland news coverage, which ranges from ‘all the good done to achieve peace and stability has been squandered’ in The Irish News (23 August 2019) to Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald proclaiming that ‘conflict in Northern Ireland has not intensified’ in the Irish Independent (18 September 2019).

15 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, ‘Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity’, (2015), E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1.

16 Special Rapporteur de Greiff notes that

conceptually, there is a difference between guarantees of non-recurrence and the remaining three core elements of a comprehensive transitional justice approach, namely, truth, justice and reparation. While those three elements refer to measures, guarantees of non-recurrence is a function that can be satisfied by a broad variety of measures.

See Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence, (7 September 2015), A/HRC/30/42, 7.

17 McEvoy, ‘Travel, Dilemmas and Nonrecurrence’, 190.

18 See Alexander Mayer-Rieckh, ‘Guarantees of Non-Recurrence: An Approximation’, Human Rights Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2017): 416–48.

19 The updated 2018 edition of The United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity: A Commentary devotes the same attention to non-recurrence as the 2005 edition, with only four out of thirty-eight principles dedicated to the topic.

20 UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence, (7 September 2015): A/HRC/30/42, https://undocs.org/A/HRC/30/42.

21 Ibid., 7.

22 Mayer-Rieckh, ‘An Approximation’, 432.

23 UN Human Rights Council (7 September 2015), 8.

24 See Naomi Roht-Arriaza, ‘Measures of Non-Repetition in Transitional Justice: The Missing Link?’, in From Transitional to Transformative Justice, eds. Paul Gready and Simon Robins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 105–30.

25 Swisspeace, A Conceptual Framework for Dealing with the Past (2013): 12–14, http://archivesproject.swisspeace.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/archivesproject/Publications/13_10_Essential_final_version_conceptual_framework.pdf.

26 OHCHR, ‘Preliminary Observations and Recommendations by the Special Rapporteur on his Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, (18 November 2015), https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16778.

27 UN Human Rights Council (2 September 2015), 27.

28 See Mayer-Rieckh, ‘An Approximation’, 440.

29 Valérie Peyronel, ‘Northern Ireland: Devolution as an Electoral Issue in the 2015 UK General Election’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique XX-3 (2015). http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/647.

30 Duncan Morrow, ‘The Rise (and Fall?) of Reconciliation in Northern Ireland’, Peace Research 44, no. 1 (2012): 5–35.

31 Northern Ireland Office, The Belfast Agreement, April 10, 1998, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-belfast-agreement.

32 Ibid.

33 Ian Somervilleand Shane Kirby, ‘Public Relations and the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Dissemination, Reconciliation and the “Good Friday Agreement” Referendum Campaign’, Public Relations Inquiry 1, no. 3 (2012): 231–55.

34 See Morrow, ‘The Rise (and Fall?)’.

35 The Northern Ireland Assembly’s 2002–2007 suspension further hindered progress, as direct rule from the United Kingdom was reinstated.

36 SHA, 6–10.

37 The Stormont House Agreement Bill (2015) removed the Implementation and Reconciliation Group from its list of legacy institutions, noting that ‘the UK Government stands ready to assist on matters related to the IRG if requested to do so by the Northern Ireland parties.’ See https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/462888/Policy_Paper_-_Summary_of_Measures_23_Sept_2015_Final.pdf, 8.

38 Ibid., 29.

39 Ibid., 31.

40 Northern Ireland Office, ‘Consultation Paper: Addressing the Legacy of Northern Ireland’s Past’, (May 2018), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/709091/Consultation_Paper_Addressing_the_Legacy_of_Northern_Irelands_Past.pdf.

41 Kieran McEvoy et al., ‘Addressing the Legacy of Northern Ireland’s Past: Response to the NIO Public Consultation’, (QUB Human Rights Centre, 2018), https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/files/157360621/MODEL_BILL_TEAM_RESPONSE_TO_NIO_LEGACY_CONSULTATION_FINAL_PDF_COPY_THAT_WAS_PRINTED_ON_MONDAY_27_AUG_2018.pdf.

42 Ibid., xxiv–xxv.

43 The Belfast Project aimed to collect firsthand accounts of the Troubles from paramilitaries on both sides of the conflict. Although Moloney and interviewer Anthony McIntyre were assured the recorded tapes would remain sealed and protected until the interviewees’ deaths, Boston College released the contents of select tapes upon receiving subpoenas from the Police Services of Northern Ireland through a mutual treaty between the UK and the United States for evidence relating to possible criminal incidents. In actuality, the embargo within interviewee consent forms had not been reviewed by Boston College attorneys or an IRB process, and a planned oversight committee never manifested. The institutional mismanagement of the oral history initiative ultimately prompted the dissolution of the project. See Beth McMurtrie, ‘Secrets from Belfast’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2014. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/belfast.

44 Ed Moloney, ‘Stormont Oral History Archive Must Be Boycotted’, The Broken Elbow, September 28, 2015, https://thebrokenelbow.com/2015/09/28/stormont-oral-history-archive-must-be-boycotted/. Significantly, as McEvoy and Bryson articulate,

under current legislation, oral history archive cannot offer a cast-iron guarantee of confidentiality. We proposed to address this by emphasising the need for training on issues of ethical and legal probity and by stating clearly that the OHA would not accept information about crimes that had not been processed and fully determined by the courts of all relevant jurisdictions. At the same time, we recognised the danger of the OHA becoming overlaid by an excessively bureaucratic and legalistic approach.

See Kieran McEvoyand Anna Bryson, ‘Justice, Truth and Oral History: Legislating the Past “from Below” in Northern Ireland’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 67–90.

45 SHA, 5.

46 Katherine Side, ‘Legacy ’s Legacy: Lessons for the Stormont House Agreement’s Oral History Archive’, Irish Studies Review 25, no. 3 (2017): 336–56.

47 Hamber and Kelly, ‘Practice, Power and Inertia’, 25.

48 See the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland (2000–2004), Operational Programme: ‘Reinforcing progress towards a peaceful and stable society and promoting reconciliation’. https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/archive/country/overmap/pdf_region/fp2mc_en.pdfand Northern Ireland Peace Programme http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ftu/pdf/en/FTU_3.1.9.pdf.

49 Patrick Smyth, ‘MEPs to Demand Continued EU Funding for NI Peace Programmes after Brexit’, The Irish Times, September 10, 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/meps-to-demand-continued-eu-funding-for-ni-peace-programmes-after-brexit-1.3624646.

50 Lorna McGregor, ‘Reconciliation: I Know it when I See It’, Contemporary Justice Review 9, no. 2 (2006): 155–74.

51 Joseph Robinson, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription: Memory, Space, and Narrative in Northern Ireland (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 17.

52 Matthew Evans, ‘A Future without Forgiveness: Beyond Reconciliation in Transitional Justice’, International Politics 55, no. 5 (2018): 678.

53 Lesley McEvoy, Kieran McEvoy, and Kirsten McConnachie, ‘Reconciliation as a Dirty Word: Conflict, Community Relations and Education in Northern Ireland’, Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 1 (2006): 81–106.

54 Ibid., 98.

55 Turner argues that transitional justice’s orientation around legal consequences could likely, if inadvertently, undo many of its own objectives:

This is seen in the way in which law is relied upon as the means of achieving justice; in particular, the way in which the boundaries of the concept of transitional justice are defined to exclude not only alternative mechanisms for dealing with political conflict, but also to silence dissenting voices that do not fit neatly into the narrative of transition. Inclusion and exclusion from the new political regime is shaped by the narrative of transition and the extent to which groups and individuals are willing or able to articulate their positions in the language of transitional justice. In the quest to immunise against recurrence, transitional justice adopts rigid structures which may ultimately work to destroy that immunity.

The questions Turner raises regarding the severe consequences of transitional justice paradigms echo the above voices concerned with reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Archival processes, specifically appraisal, selection, and deselection, result in what is included and excluded from the archival record. Following Turner’s argument, the OHA’s reconciliatory focus could, however unintentionally, result in the recurrence of past trauma, particularly if the collection is exclusively comprised of ‘approved’ conflict-related content. See Catherine Turner, ‘Deconstructing Transitional Justice’, Law and Critique 24, no. 2 (2013): 206.

56 Ibid., 194.

57 See Hamber and Kelly, ‘Practice, Power and Inertia’, which expounds on the proliferation of hegemonic narratives in Northern Ireland.

58 Adrian Little, ‘Disjunctured Narratives: Rethinking Reconciliation and Conflict Transformation’, International Political Science Review 33, no. 1 (2012): 85.

59 Joseph Robinson, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription, 30.

60 Bill Rolston and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, ‘Colonialism, Redress and Transitional Justice: Ireland and Beyond’, State Crime 7, no. 2 (2018): 344.

61 One of their solutions is to ‘invert the proposed governance model so that the Steering Group takes “charge and superintendence” of the OHA’, rather than PRONI’s Deputy Keeper maintaining sole direction. See pp. xxiv–v.

62 Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers, ‘Structuring Accountability Systems in Organizations: Key Trade-Offs and Critical Unknowns’, in Intelligence Analysis: Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations, eds. Baruch Fischhoff and Cherie Chauvin (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2011), 266–7.

63 Richard Cox and David Wallace, introduction to Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society, eds. Richard Cox and David Wallace (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002), 3; See also Kevin Kearns, Managing for Accountability: Preserving the Public Trust in Public and Nonprofit Organizations (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1996).

64 Kearns cited in Cox and Wallace, ‘Introduction’, 3.

65 Barbara Romzek and Melvin Dubnick, ‘Accountability in the Public Sector: Lessons from the Challenger Tragedy’, Public Administration Review 47, no. 3 (1987): 230.

66 Randall Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2009), 246. He details archives’ roles in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, documenting genocide under Pol Pot, and maintaining key aspects of the Iran-Contra affair and the Watergate scandal as examples of this kind of internal-external connection.

67 See Randall Jimerson, ‘Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice', The American Archivist 70, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 252–81; Andrew Flinn, ‘Archival Activism: Independent and Community-Led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions', InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 7, no. 2 (2011); Michelle Caswell, ‘Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse: Lessons from Community Archives’, Archival Science 14, no. 3 (2014): 307–22.

68 Anna Robinson-Sweet, ‘Truth and Reconciliation: Archivists as Reparations Activists’, American Archivist 81, no. 1 (2018): 23–37.

69 Hamber and Kelly, ‘Practice, Power and Inertia’, 33–4.

70 ‘Peace III Programme (2007–2013)’, Special EU Programmes Body (Past Programmes Overview) https://www.seupb.eu/pastprogrammes/past-programmes-overview.

71 Terry Cook, ‘“A Monumental Blunder”: The Destruction of Records on Nazi War Criminals in Canada’, in Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society, eds. Richard Cox and David Wallace (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002), 38.

72 Ibid., 64.

73 Elena Danielson, The Ethical Archivist (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2010), 25.

74 Tom Nesmith, ‘Documenting Appraisal as a Societal-Archival Process: Theory, Practice, and Ethics in the Wake of Helen Willa Samuels’, in Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions, ed. Terry Cook (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2011), 31–50, 33.

75 Ibid., 36–7.

76 See Chris Hurley, ‘Recordkeeping and Accountability’, in Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, eds. Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward (Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005), 223–54.

77 Joanne Evans et al., ‘Self-Determination and Archival Autonomy: Advocating Activism’, Archival Science 15, no. 4 (2015): 355.

78 Ibid., 347.

79 Michelle Caswell, ‘Rethinking Inalienability: Trusting Nongovernmental Archives in Transitional Societies’, American Archivist 76, no. 1 (2013): 130.

80 See Michelle Caswell, ‘Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse: Lessons from Community Archives’, Archival Science 14, no. 3 (2014): 307–22.

81 Bottom-up, community-based approaches may also aid in addressing the complex socioeconomic roots of the Troubles and incorporating these issues into future peace-related work. Intra-communal violence in the form of self-policing persists in lower- and working-class Catholic and Protestant communities today. Punishment shootings, designed to be non-fatal, are methods for communities to police and administer justice outside of official state bodies. Not only have these forms of violence persevered beyond the peace process, but Lau et al.’s 2017 medical study found, they ‘have begun to evolve into more complex injuries’, often including wounds in not one, but all four limbs. Man-Chi Lau, et al., ‘Belfast Limb Arterial and Skeletal Trauma (BLAST): The Evolution of Punishment Shooting in Northern Ireland’, Irish Journal of Medical Science 186, no. 3 (2017): 747. See also: Kathy Gilsinan, ‘In Northern Ireland, Vigilante Violence Keeps Terrorizing Communities’, The Atlantic, November 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/11/violence-northern-ireland-belfast-paramilitaries/576532/; Lisa Laplante, ‘Transitional Justice and Peace Building: Diagnosing and Addressing the Socioeconomic Roots of Violence through a Human Rights Framework’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 331–55.

82 Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. ‘Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy, and the Mainstream’, Archival Science 9, no. 1 (2009): 71–86, 80.

83 See https://prisonsmemoryarchive.com/aboutpma/.

84 Ibid., ‘Co-ownership.’

85 It may be helpful here to consider Balasco’s analysis of transformative justice as not merely the fourth-generation of transitional justice. Not only does she question the concept of transformative justice, but she further argues that it should be ‘decoupled’ from transitional justice so that it may achieve its full, dynamic potential and not only considered an off-shoot or ‘prism’ of transitional justice. See Lauren Marie Balasco, ‘Locating Transformative Justice: Prism or Schism in Transitional Justice?’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 12, no. 2 (2018): 368–78.