The archival heritage of outgoing authoritarian or otherwise repressive regimes, be it the archives of the ruling party, police records, secret surveillance files, or other archives of various institutions, is of paramount importance for transitional justice. Such archives, often previously secret, are essential for policies like lustration and investigations of truth commissions, and archival documents are often used as evidence in criminal trials. Also, the direct access of citizens to their personal surveillance files made by communist secret police is one of the most direct ways of providing justice to the victims of these regimes. Many view access to archives as the single most important instrument for understanding and coming to terms with the past. Numerous analysts hold, however, a more cautious view of the benefits of unlimited access to these archives, and warn against excessive expectations of finding the ultimate truth solely on the basis of these records. Archival records were of remarkable utility for the trials against former leaders and the truth commissions in Latin America, but the advantages – and the disadvantages – of using archival records for transitional justice purposes were particularly clearly revealed in post-communist Eastern Europe, where such records have played a central role in screening, lustration, and public identification of perpetrators.

Transitional justice has been marginalized in Afghanistan’s stabilization and state-building process. The aftermath of the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan was marked by victors’ justice: the Taliban were driven away, while commanders and factional leaders with known records of human rights violations and war crimes were included into the government with no attention to accountability. The current efforts to promote a peace process with the Taliban have also been done without any reference to accountability or other transitional justice components.

The Algerian government, headed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika since 1999, created the Ad Hoc Inquiry Commission in Charge of the Question of Disappearances (Commission d’Enquête ad hoc chargée de la question des disparus) in September 2003. The aim of this six-person presidential commission chaired by lawyer Farouk Ksentini was to investigate disappearances during the armed conflict between the Algerian government, its allied civilian militias, and various Islamist insurgent organizations. From 1992 to 2002, a period known as the “dark” or “black” decade, thousands of Algerians were allegedly abducted by regime forces, pro-government militias, their Islamist opponents, and other armed groups with unclear political agendas (see entry on Algeria). The six members of the Ad Hoc Inquiry Commission, attached to the National Consultative Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (Commission Nationale Consultative de Promotion et de Protection des Droits de l’Homme, CNCPPDH), an institution housed under the Algerian presidency, worked for eighteen months, largely in secret. Its confidential report, delivered to President Bouteflika in March 2005, was never made public. The government eventually admitted responsibility for over 6,000 cases – half of all of the suspected disappearances from the civil conflict – and offered the families compensation in lieu of providing substantive details about the fate of their relatives or holding any officials accountable.

As a transitional justice method, access to secret files entails opening the files and documents compiled by the secret political police of past authoritarian regimes to the general public, such that citizens can access the information contained in their own files and possibly in other people’s. To qualify as a transitional justice method, access must be granted to ordinary citizens, not just historians, journalists, or academics. The files must have been compiled by the secret intelligence services and regarded as secret from the moment of their creation. They are not files created by ruling political parties or government branches that were subsequently declared secret, and were destined to be seen by a handful of top-ranking officials.

Sometimes called “accountability for past crimes/wrongs” in a transitional justice setting, criminal accountability is the process whereby human rights abusers are held responsible for their misdeeds through identifying the crime and the perpetrator, holding fair and free trials, and meting out punishment in accordance with the crime committed. Criminal accountability, usually considered prerequisite to the rule of law, is neither “horizontal accountability” (checks and balances of power between the three branches of government) nor “vertical accountability” (citizens holding elected officials to account through elections) in democracy. Noncriminal accountability is achieved through exposing the name and misdeeds of perpetrators to public condemnation in the absence of trials.