Symposium on Advancing Effective and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine: Introduction

[Ana Cutts Dougherty is a Legal Consultant at REDRESS, an NGO based in London and The Hague that seeks justice and reparation for survivors of serious international crimes and human rights violations.

Katya Ravinska is a Legal Officer at REDRESS. 

Alejandro Rodríguez-Díaz is a Legal Officer at REDRESS. 

Julie Bardèche is a Senior Legal Advisor at REDRESS.

Lyra Nightingale is a Senior Legal Advisor at REDRESS.]

When, and how, will victims of the war in Ukraine receive reparation for the harms they have suffered, and continue to experience? What steps must be taken to ensure that domestic and international reparation mechanisms operate effectively and complement each other? How will these mechanisms be funded? Crucially, what role must victims and survivors play in shaping these processes themselves? And is the Ukrainian reparations experience setting a benchmark for similar processes in other contexts? Is further innovation still needed? These are just some of the many live questions at the heart of ongoing debates on reparation for victims of the war in Ukraine. Whilst broader discussions on Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery are taking place in the international community, the space given to reparations has been conspicuously small and siloed.

Given the complexity and urgency of these and related questions, there is a clear need for exchanges of diverse experiences and expertise to identify key challenges and offer potential solutions. Civil society has a unique role to play in fostering and participating in the exchange of experiences, to support a bottom-up community of practice for reparation, and to bring together actors who might otherwise work in silos. This exchange should include local and national perspectives, ensuring that attention is given not only to the technical aspects of reparation processes, but also to social considerations and victims’ priorities. International and comparative exchanges are also crucial for drawing on lessons learned from other contexts, anticipating potential risks and challenges, and employing best practices.

REDRESS has invited a group of experts, including survivors, scholars, and practitioners to contribute to a blog symposium on Advancing Effective and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine. Over the course of the coming week, this series will bring into conversation twelve contributions reflecting on the reparation process for victims of serious international crimes and human rights violations committed in the context of the Russian aggression in Ukrainian territories that began in February 2014 and escalated with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The authors’ perspectives are varied, including several Ukrainian authors, some authors drawing from international experience, and several sharing comparative insights from domestic reparation processes in Guatemala, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and The Gambia. The contributions in this symposium offer valuable lessons and proposals not only for Ukraine’s path forward, but for reparation efforts everywhere. In this introductory piece, we outline some of the key ideas raised in the symposium, including the importance of centring survivors’ voices in the reparation process, and the need for coordination, complementarity, and innovative financing including asset recovery to support the emerging reparation landscape for Ukraine. 

Centring Survivors’ Voices in the Reparation Process

The centrality of survivor participation in the reparation process is well established in international standards and reinforced by practice across different contexts, such as in Guatemala, Colombia, The Gambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other contexts where reparation processes have taken place. Experiences in these contexts have consistently shown that reparations are more likely to be meaningful and transformative when survivors help shape both their form and implementation. Lack of survivor voices in reparation processes can lead to reparation that fails to address structural harm, reproduces inequalities, remains inaccessible to those most affected, or affects the legitimacy of the reparation process, making it less likely to contribute to repairing the social fabric. Placing survivors at the centre of these processes is not only a matter of international standards, but a practical precondition for delivering effective, inclusive, and meaningful reparation. 

This symposium opens with contributions that emphasise the importance of centring survivors in the reparation process for Ukraine, and offers guidance on how this can meaningfully be done. Sharing his perspective as a survivor leader, Konstantin Davidenko highlights the long-lasting consequences of the harms experienced by survivors in Ukraine, and the need for reparation mechanisms to take survivors’ priorities and voices into account from the moment of their conception, and throughout their design and implementation, rather than only at the stage of receiving reparation. This – in addition to accounting for the specific kinds of harms suffered by different survivors – is key to a reparations system’s legitimacy and effectiveness. 

This symposium features four articles sharing comparative experiences that demonstrate the importance of placing survivors in the centre of reparation processes. Laura Posada shares relevant lessons from Colombia’s Victim Identification Commission, including that truly victim-centred design means anticipating legal and administrative complexities from the outset in order to avoid fragmented processes and mitigate the risk of over-bureaucratisation. Sirra Ndow, a survivor leader from The Gambia, offers reflections on The Gambia’s transitional justice process and its key lessons for Ukraine in her piece. These include the importance of memorialisation, interim reparation, adaptive approaches, and the institutionalisation of victim organisations as co-designers of reparation processes. In her contribution, Lucia Xiloj describes how the cross-cutting participation of Indigenous Maya Achi women survivors of sexual violence in Guatemala was crucial to their own reparation process, empowered other women, and helped shape reparation measures tailored to address the harms they suffered. Finally, in their piece, Jeanne d’Arc Katungu Ndondo and Julienne Lusenge offer lessons from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where their organisation, Solidarité Féminine pour la Paix et le Développement Intégral (SOFEPADI) has implemented reparation through its model of holistic care, including medical and psychological care, legal support, and socioeconomic and school reintegration support for victims. They emphasise that reparation programmes must have neutral coordination, secure financial processes, and direct survivor involvement in order to ensure meaningful outcomes for victims.  

Drawing on comparative experiences from other contexts to inform reparation processes for Ukraine is also a useful exercise in part because of the universality of the right to reparation. As Shuichi Furuya conveys in his contribution, the selective vindication of this right would undermine its universality and weaken the moral and legal force of existing reparation efforts: specifically, he asserts that if victims in Ukraine have a right to reparation, then so do victims in Gaza. Comparing Ukraine and Gaza exposes the common challenge of preserving the universality of victims’ rights under profoundly unequal political conditions. If anything, reparation processes established for Ukrainian victims will ideally set replicable standards that benefit victims in other contexts, reaffirming the universal character of this right.

The Emerging Reparation Landscape for Ukraine, and the Need for Coordination, Complementarity, and Funding

Reparation for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law is an inherently complex and context-dependent process. While international law sets out clear standards obligating States to provide reparation to victims, the design and implementation of reparation measures require far more than the formal application of legal norms. Reparation processes are multifaceted and can pose complex challenges, depending on factors such as political will, resource availability, institutional capacity, and broader practical constraints.  

In Ukraine’s case, the reparation landscape is uniquely complex given the existence of many administrative reparation schemes at the domestic level, a dedicated three-component international compensation mechanism for Ukraine (consisting of the Register of Damage, the expected Claims Commission, and a future compensation fund), alongside reparation ordered or that might be ordered by international mechanisms including the European Court of Human Rights, the Trust Fund for Victims of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the anticipated Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, as well as domestic and foreign criminal investigations, ICC investigations, and domestic civil claims.

In her contribution to this symposium, Albina Basysta provides a comprehensive overview of Ukraine’s administrative reparations schemes, including Law 4067 (also known as the Bardina Law) which represents the world’s first administrative procedure for urgent interim reparation for conflict-related sexual violence survivors. She also discusses less widely known administrative reparation schemes, and outlines the steps required from Ukraine in order to transition from fragmented administrative programmes to “a coherent national reparations system for all categories of war victims”. Cristián Correa’s contribution similarly calls for clear Ukrainian leadership on reparation, while also elaborating on how and why urgent interim reparation must be provided, as well as highlighting the need for integration and coordination across interim domestic mechanisms and international mechanisms. 

According to Illia Chernohorenko, the need for an international compensation mechanism arises from the sheer scale of harms and losses impacting Ukraine, which are of too great a magnitude for Ukraine’s domestic mechanisms alone to absorb. His contribution focuses on international reparation mechanisms, identifying structural fragmentation and calling for a coordinated and carefully sequenced approach across reparation mechanisms, while also arguing that immobilised Russian assets should be preserved as a potential source of funding for reparation. 

In his contribution, Luke Moffett echoes the need for coordination while also calling on local and international civil society, international institutions, and domestic bodies to recalibrate around a long-term strategy for reparation, co-designed with victims. He suggests that taking a longer view on reparation would involve supporting documentation and evidence efforts, time-proofing claims, and ensuring the inter-operability of claims before different enforcement mechanisms.

Turning to the critical issue of how to finance reparation, Natalia Kubesch and Lyra Nightingale’s joint contribution traces the ambitions behind efforts to repurpose frozen Russian assets, the legal and political obstacles efforts have encountered, and the incremental workarounds now emerging. They argue that while no comprehensive legal solution yet exists to enable the large-scale confiscation and repurposing of Russian frozen assets for reparations, the debate has evolved in important ways. The authors highlight how incremental and fragmented progress on the long road towards asset recovery for reparation can be capitalised on by States to create credible pathways for supporting survivors.

Conclusion

This symposium brings into conversation a diverse range of perspectives on critically important and timely questions as to how to fulfil the right to reparation of victims of the war in Ukraine. In doing so, the symposium contributes to moving the focus of discussion surrounding Ukraine’s future from only reconstruction to the right to reparation for all victims in Ukraine. It raises normative questions and outlines potential solutions to complicated practical challenges. Lessons drawn from comparative experience offer guidance for the Ukrainian context, and the challenges and innovations already identified for Ukraine might offer lessons for reparation efforts everywhere. We hope that these pieces will contribute to the growing momentum around reparation for victims of the war in Ukraine. 

We hope the symposium will help to ensure that reparation remains high on the agenda in ongoing discussions of Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery, for example at the upcoming Ukraine Recovery Conference in June. Key stakeholders such as the European Union should support a comprehensive range of reparation measures to ensure they achieve their transformative potential. Survivors and civil society organisations should be included in the design of reparation processes, for example through opportunities to participate in key convenings such as those of the Preparatory Committee for the Claims Commission, to ensure that reparation mechanisms are survivor-centred and co-designed with survivors. 

Heeding survivors’ many calls for justice and reparation is the most promising path to recovery; reparation is key to rebuilding. 

Note from Author: REDRESS is an NGO based in London and The Hague that seeks justice and reparation for survivors of serious international crimes and human rights violations. REDRESS’s approach is grounded in a survivor-centred framework that affirms survivors as rights-holders and as actors who have the expertise and knowledge that are essential to shaping inclusive and meaningful justice and reparation processes. We are employing this approach in our current work relating to Ukraine, which encompasses survivor-centred advocacy for reparation, efforts to strengthen reparation mechanisms and support the submission of torture-related claims, and our recent work developing Guidelines for Repurposing Russia-Linked Assets to Finance Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine.

This symposium represents one of REDRESS’s ongoing efforts to build a community of practice to advance reparation for Ukraine. This initiative is co-funded by the European Union through the Global Initiative Against Impunity: Making Justice Work. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the European Union.