Transitional justice is meant to repair. Last week, a webinar by SAM for Rights and Liberties and the Abductees’ Mothers Association, held under the SPARK project with support from the DT Institute, set out to compare transitional justice pathways in Yemen and Syria while conflict still threatens any attempts at sewing back together communities.

Through the SPARK project, DT Institute supports locally led documentation and accountability efforts designed not only to preserve victims’ testimonies, but to ensure they are structured for use in future transitional justice processes, international accountability mechanisms, and reparations frameworks. By connecting grassroots documentation to policy and justice actors, the project seeks to prevent evidence from remaining siloed and instead position it for meaningful legal and institutional impact. 

In this webinar, survivors, decision-makers, and peacebuilders swapped lessons across borders. And the tone was clear: transitional justice, with victims leading the process, is at the core of any genuine change. Speakers kept returning to truth-seeking, redress, reparations, accountability, and institutional reform, with a warning that reconciliation without truth is precarious and justice without victims’ voices remains incomplete.

What concrete steps are being taken? In Yemen, a draft transitional justice law was introduced in 2012 and considered by the National Committee, with two committees focused on land and displaced persons being set up. However, the framework was designed primarily to address violations committed prior to 2014, and it now requires substantial revision to reflect the scale and nature of violations that have occurred since the escalation of the conflict that year. 

On top of this, the issue of reparations is still unresolved. A fund was established with a donation from the State of Qatar, alongside a reconstruction fund for Abyan and Dhale’ governorates as a form of collective reparations. Unfortunately, the whole process stalled despite remaining legally binding under existing documents and ripe for revival when Parliament reconvenes.  

Documentation matters when it leads somewhere concrete. Yemen’s civil society has done serious groundwork when it comes to monitoring and documentation work, but institutional fragmentation, access barriers, and trust gaps keep delaying progress. In particular, victims often feel their testimony is collected and then left to gather dust, weakening willingness to engage, and undermining confidence in accountability.

“In Yemen, accountability has been undermined by the 2012 immunity law granted to members of the former regime. By shielding key actors from prosecution, the law entrenched impunity and weakened public trust in justice.”

Sahar Mohamad, DTi Program Assistant

Syria is at a different stage, but shares some common ground. A framework based on interconnected tracks was presented: truth, accountability, reparations, national memory, guarantees of non-recurrence, and peacebuilding. Despite the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) for truth-seeking, there is a continued absence of a centralized national database. Like in Yemen, this missing block hinders the development of a comprehensive national truth-seeking process.

Both countries also share decimated economies and the multiplicity of violation patterns, with each region having its own distinct pattern of abuses. For example, in areas experiencing violations on top of violations, such as Deir ez-Zor and Aleppo, sectarian issues require a tailored approach, with victims themselves involved in the Commission even as some initiatives have struggled with inclusion.

“While the political trajectories of Syria and Yemen differ, the structural foundations of transitional justice remain strikingly similar.

In both contexts, civil society has carried the burden of documentation and truth-seeking, yet reparations remain under-resourced, centralized databases are missing, and meaningful security and judicial reform is still essential to prevent recurrence.

Yemen may be in a preparatory phase tied to a future political settlement, while Syria has begun shaping early frameworks, but in both cases the real risk is that political agendas and external dynamics overshadow victims’ rights.

Sustainable stabilization will not come from negotiated arrangements alone; it depends on anchoring documentation, institutional reform, and reparations in long-term accountability rather than short-term compromise.”

Feras Hamdouni, DTi Yemen’s Senior Program Manager

Civil society has been the glue. It came up again and again, how crucial civil society has been to elevate the voices of victims, making them feel ownership around the documentation process and regaining a sense of agency. This involvement strengthens legitimacy, but its effects on political and social actors still need further systematic assessment.

The closing message was a push against reducing transitional justice to power-sharing: expand civil coalitions, anchor demands in binding commitments, keep victims protected and central, and improve communication as we cannot expect communities to engage if they cannot understand what transitional justice is about.

You can watch the full recording of the webinar in Arabic here and in English here. And for further details on the event, you can also read this article from Justice 4 Yemen Pact coalition.