Symposium on Advancing Effective and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine: Beyond Selective Justice – Comparing Reparations for Victims in Ukraine and Gaza

[Shuichi Furuya is Professor of International Law at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan; and a former member of the UN Human Rights Committee. He has delivered lectures “Changing Aspects of Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict” at the Hague Academy of International Law, Winter Session 2026]

Reparations are often treated as something that comes after war: after the fighting has ended, after responsibility has been established, and after political negotiations have run their course. For victims, however, reparations are not an afterthought. They are part of what makes justice real. They recognize harm, restore dignity, and help rebuild lives shattered by unlawful violence. In that sense, reparations are not simply about money. They are about whether international law treats victims as right-holders or merely as objects of humanitarian concern.

This question is particularly urgent when one compares Ukraine and Gaza. In the case of Ukraine, discussion of reparations has moved with remarkable speed from principle to institutional design. A Register of Damage has been established under the auspices of the Council of Europe, with the express function of receiving and recording claims and evidence for future examination and adjudication (Resolution CM/Res(2025)3, Appendix, Arts. 1-2). In December 2025, a Convention establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine was adopted, envisaging a second institutional component that would review, assess, and decide claims, while leaving open the possible creation of a future compensation fund as a third component (Convention establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine, Preamble and Art. 3). By contrast, nothing comparable exists for Gaza.

That asymmetry is not merely technical. It raises a more fundamental question: are reparations a legal entitlement of victims as such, or a political project that advances only when a sufficient coalition of States is willing to support it?

That question is not only about political inconsistency. It also forces us to ask what kind of reparations are realistically imaginable in each setting, and whether the same legal language of reparation can sustain different institutional forms without losing its normative core. Ukraine and Gaza are comparable not because they present identical facts or politics, but because each exposes, in a different way, the gap between the universal language of victims’ rights and the uneven conditions under which those rights may be implemented. To make sense of that comparison, it is useful to distinguish between two different dimensions of reparative design: first, the distinction between individual and collective reparations; and second, the distinction between responsibility-based and solidarity-based reparations.

Two Axes of Comparison

A useful comparison between Ukraine and Gaza requires two distinctions. The first is between individual and collective reparations. Individual reparations address harm suffered by identifiable persons: a family member killed, a bodily injury inflicted, a home destroyed, a livelihood lost. Collective reparations, by contrast, respond to harms suffered by groups, communities, or populations, often through community rehabilitation, reconstruction of schools and hospitals, psychosocial services, memorialization, or similar measures benefiting a wider collectivity.

The second distinction is between responsibility-based and solidarity-based reparations. Responsibility-based reparations follow the classical structure of international responsibility: the wrongdoer must repair the injury caused. Solidarity-based reparations rely on resources from third parties—States, international organizations, donors, or private actors—not because they are legally responsible, but because they are willing to support victims where the responsible actor refuses or is unable to do so.

Seen through this lens, Ukraine appears to be moving more decisively toward individualized reparations. The Register of Damage is designed to receive claims from natural and legal persons as well as from the State of Ukraine, and its categories are highly specific: involuntary displacement, death of an immediate family member, serious personal injury, sexual violence, torture, loss of housing, loss of employment, damage to infrastructure, environmental harm, and humanitarian public expenditures (Resolution CM/Res(2025)3, Appendix, Art. 2.1–2.5; RD4U-Board(2024)07-Rev1-EN, Categories of Claims Eligible for Recording, para. 1, Categories A–C). At the same time, Ukraine’s reparations architecture remains predominantly responsibility-based. The emerging framework rests on the premise that the Russian Federation bears legal responsibility for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts in or against Ukraine (Convention, Arts. 3(4), 21(1)). Even where interim financing may come from participating States, the underlying idea remains that Russia should ultimately bear the burden. Debates over the use of frozen Russian assets reflect the same logic: they seek to preserve the link between wrongdoing and payment.

Gaza presents a much harder case for that model. The scale of destruction, the breadth of the affected population, and the political obstacles make individualized compensation funded by the responsible actor extraordinarily difficult to operationalize. This does not mean that legal responsibility disappears. It means that a mechanism built solely on that model is unlikely to meet victims’ needs. In Gaza, reparations would almost inevitably need to rely more heavily on collective and solidarity-based measures.

Yet the contrast should not be overstated. Even in Ukraine, a fully individualized and responsibility-based model may prove insufficient. Recent ICC practice suggests that in mass-harm settings, collective reparations may be unavoidable, but they may still need to be supplemented by individualized forms of acknowledgment so that victims do not feel their personal suffering has disappeared into an abstract community project (for instance, Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, Appeals Judgment, 7 April 2025, para. 146; paras. 157–161).

Building a Victim-Centered Reparation Mechanism

This is why a victim-centered approach is indispensable. A mechanism may be sophisticated on paper and yet still fail victims if it does not adequately reflect their experiences, priorities, and expectations. The real test is therefore not simply whether a mechanism exists, but whether it is designed and implemented in a way that treats victims as participants in justice rather than passive recipients of policy. Three considerations are especially important here: participation, prioritization, and the relationship between reparation and future reconstruction.

The first principle is victim participation. Ukraine’s current framework shows both progress and limits. The claims rules for the Register of Damage provide for outreach, technical assistance, facilitation of access to evidence, and digital claim submission (RD4U-Board(2024)04-Rev1-EN, Claims Rules, Arts. 5–6, 13–14). These are important measures. But they mainly concern participation at the stage of submission and implementation. The design of the system itself—the Register, the Claims Commission, and the possible future fund—has largely been driven by the Council of Europe, Ukraine, and participating States. Victims have a place within the mechanism, but not an obvious role in shaping its constitutional design. That may be understandable in emergency circumstances, but it remains a weakness from a victim-centered perspective. Greater participation at that earlier stage might have influenced the scope, modalities, and beneficiaries of reparations; even where it did not, such participation would still matter, because it helps make reparations something claimed as of right rather than granted from above. This is an important lesson for Gaza. Any future reparation mechanism for Gaza must incorporate Palestinian victims’ voices not only in implementation but also in institutional design, priority-setting, and review.

The second principle is prioritization. The Ukraine Register classifies claims in remarkable detail, but classification is not the same as priority. The future Claims Commission treaty expressly leaves to the Council the adoption of rules on “the order of priority for the review, assessment, and decision of Claims” (Convention, Art. 10(2)(c)(vii)). That means the most normatively difficult questions remain open. Which claims should come first: deaths, serious injuries, sexual violence, displacement, destruction of homes, destruction of schools, environmental damage, or public humanitarian expenditures? Priority cannot be determined only by administrative convenience. A victim-centered mechanism must explain why some harms are addressed earlier than others and must do so by reference to urgency, vulnerability, and the relationship between reparation and survival. In both Ukraine and Gaza, children, survivors of sexual violence, the severely injured, and those deprived of shelter or essential care would seem to warrant expedited attention.

The third principle is that reparations should be understood partly as an investment in future reconstruction. It recognizes that in situations of mass destruction, a purely backward-looking logic of monetary loss accounting is inadequate. Reparations must also contribute to rebuilding the conditions of dignified life. The line between reparations and reconstruction is therefore not absolute. In Gaza especially, collective reparations would necessarily overlap with reconstruction: housing, hospitals, schools, electricity, water, and sanitation. Ukraine too may require collective programmes alongside individualized claims. The essential point is that reconstruction should retain a reparative meaning. It should acknowledge victims as victims, not simply as beneficiaries of ordinary aid.

Funding Justice

These victim-centered concerns also have an institutional implication. If reparations are to be participatory, prioritized, and responsive to long-term reconstruction needs, they require not only adjudicative bodies but also a credible financial vehicle capable of translating legal recognition into actual delivery. This is where the question of a trust fund becomes central.

For Ukraine, the institutional path is already partially visible. The Register is the first component; the Claims Commission is the second; and both instruments contemplate a possible compensation fund as a future third component. But because that third stage remains undefined, the issues of legitimacy and governance should be addressed now. A future fund would need transparent management, clear allocation criteria, protection against political capture, and a structure capable of balancing donor confidence with victim-centered legitimacy. The Commission Convention already contains important pieces of such a framework: rules on independence, transparency, financial oversight, voluntary contributions, and the continuation of the Register’s work within the Commission (Convention, Arts. 15, 20, 23–25). Still, much will depend on how those provisions are operationalized.

The financing question reveals the sharpest difference between Ukraine and Gaza. In Ukraine, the dominant discourse still seeks a way—directly or indirectly—to connect payment to Russian responsibility. In Gaza, by contrast, any serious reparations project would almost certainly require a solidarity-based fund from the outset, drawing on States, international organizations, and perhaps private donors. In that respect, Gaza may in practice be closer to the logic that has emerged in the reparations jurisprudence of the ICC, where the Trust Fund for Victims has used voluntary contributions to supplement or substitute for the absent resources of convicted persons. The lesson is not that responsibility no longer matters. It is that solidarity may be necessary to keep the right to reparation alive when responsibility cannot yet be translated into payment.

Ad Hoc Design and Universal Right

The discussion of participation, prioritization, and funding ultimately points to a broader normative issue. Once one accepts that reparations mechanisms must be tailored to context, financed in different ways, and structured around different mixes of individual and collective measures, an unavoidable question arises: how far can reparative design remain context-specific without emptying the right to reparation of its universal character? That is the tension between ad hoc design and universality.

Every reparations mechanism is shaped by context: the nature of the conflict, the scale of damage, the available resources, the political environment, and the institutional actors willing to move. In that sense, ad hoc design is unavoidable. Ukraine and Gaza will not, and cannot, have identical mechanisms.

But the right to reparation cannot be ad hoc in the same way. If victims in Ukraine have a right to reparations, then victims in Gaza have one too. If States that support reparative justice in Ukraine remain silent on Gaza, the implication is hard to ignore: reparations are not really rights, but policy choices activated selectively. That would not only fail Gaza’s victims. It would also weaken the moral and legal force of the reparations project in Ukraine itself. Selective vindication undermines universality.

Comparative reflection on reparations therefore matters for more than institutional borrowing. Its deeper value lies in identifying how universal victim rights can be connected to workable implementation across very different political settings. Ukraine and Gaza should not be compared in order to collapse their differences. They should be compared in order to expose a common challenge: how to preserve the universality of victims’ rights under profoundly unequal political conditions.

In Ukraine, the institutional conversation is already advanced. In Gaza, it has barely begun. That gap should not be normalized. It should be treated as a challenge to international law itself. Indeed, if reparations are truly part of the legal status of victims, then the task is not simply to build better mechanisms where political will already exists. It is also to insist that no set of victims be left outside the reparative horizon.

Photo attribution: “A lone tree stands in a field of yellow grass” is by “Wolfgang Hasslemann“