Impunity Is Policy: Nepal’s Transitional Justice System Under Indictment -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The civil war in Nepal ended with a peace agreement (the Comprehensive Peace Accord) reached on 21 November 2006. The violence did not.

It simply changed form.

Today, the nation introduces itself as post conflict success story check marks for peace accords signed, institutions created, commissions formed. But underneath this edited lie, the harder truth is that Nepal has never confronted its past. It has managed it. And in so doing it has taken impunity, which is failure, and made it a method of governance.

Contextualising the failure Transitional justice was never intended to challenge power in Nepal. It was built to house it.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons were expected to expose injustices, bring justice about and reparations. Rather, they are bureaucratic warrens for suffering files of evidence with no future direction. Many more victims have since stepped forward. Few have seen meaningful accountability. Fewer still have seen justice. It is not a technical failure, It is a political choice.

If states delay justice long enough, it is the delay itself that becomes part of the outcome. Open remain files, pending investigations and protected perpetrators not through an apparent refusal to comply but by procedural burnout. Time is weaponized. Memory is diluted. And victims are quietly pushed to the edges f their own story.

Nepal, however, lays bare a bigger challenge for the global architectures of transitional justice: The belief that peace and justice are separable goals. They cannot.

Silence dependent peace is not stability it is repression. The kind of reconciliation process that does not name perpetrators from the other side is no healing but a deeper fracture in society. Justice is not delayed but it becomes a matter of choice. It is denied.

The consequences are not abstract.

Meanwhile families of the disappeared await. Torture and sexual violence survivors co-exist with their abusers. Whole communities bear unfinished agony, and are expected to suck it up for the sake of national unity. This is not reconciliation. It is coerced forgetting.

And it comes at a cost.

We reproduce the words, a horrible system that only pushes past outrage in becalmed periods. The message that emerges from the absence of accountability is unambiguously clear: power protects itself. In such a context, the rule of law will become conditional: universally applied to some groups and selectively to others. Institutions lose credibility. Trust erodes. With past abuse and future risk, the line starts to become a blur.

Nepal is not alone in this. Instead, increasingly across the globe this transitional justice is being stripped of its substance by becoming truth commissions nor consequence, apologies without accountability reparations for wrong-doing. The language of justice is saved but its essence has been drained out.

Nepal offers an especially revealing window into the deeply contradictory character of this dynamic, so openly is it functioning there. The architecture of justice exists. The political will does not.

That space is where impunity flourishes.

The international community is also responsible. Nepal’s peace process has been hailed as practical even a model for years. Accountability has taken a back seat to stability. Hard truths have been softened by diplomatic language. External actors have legitimized a system which purposefully evades its main duty  justice, by accepting process as progress

Normalizing impunity is not pragmatic, however.

Zoning that documents violations without providing enforcement when the new zoning is violated, does not work, it cannot be neutral. It is complicit. A process that recognizes suffering, but protects the perpetrator is not failure. It is designed.

The transitional justice system of Nepal is not a failure by design. It works to that exact degree because of it.

This is the ugly truth: Impunity is not due to weak institutions, it isnt a failure. It is a by-product of political expediency,  one that values short term order over long term justice, and elite consensus over victims’ rights.

This creates an illusion of peace, however it is a superficial stability built upon ongoing injustice.

And this, the peace you have, is also a fragility.

Unresolved violence does not just go away. It hangs around in institutions, in social relations and collective memory. It has an influence over how power is exercised, and law applied. He knows whose suffering counts and whose does not.

Nepal will not be on its way to completing the transition until that changes.

More importantly, it remains dishonest.

Justice is not a technical cosmetic addition to peace processes. It is their foundation. The lie of reconciliation without it, the democracy disfigured by compromised institutions and a promise to “never forget” rendered little more than ritualistic chatter.

Nepal is at a crossroads, but not the one described in echoing headlines. It’s not a matter of choosing between peace and justice anymore. That moment has passed.

The question for now is whether to challenge impunity or enshrine it. So far, the answer is clear.

And it is not justice.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University of 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia