When a Public Cause Becomes a Professional Sector
Transitional justice in Syria needs more than money. It needs independent decision-making, legitimate representation and clear lines of responsibility. Funding can help document crimes, protect witnesses, support families of the missing, provide legal and psychological assistance, and strengthen institutions. But without safeguards, it can also redirect the process itself: determining which issues are studied, which groups receive support, which organisations speak in the name of victims, and even the language through which justice and its priorities are defined.
The question is therefore not whether transitional justice requires funding. It certainly does. The question is who sets the priorities, who chooses the representatives of victims, who controls testimony and data, and who decides whether a project has succeeded. Is an organisation accountable primarily to the donor that paid for its work, or to the people whose stories, documents and images were collected in the name of justice?
During the Syrian conflict, a substantial sector emerged around documentation, human rights, missing persons, accountability, peacebuilding, reconciliation and transitional justice. Many organisations and individuals performed indispensable work, particularly when national institutions were absent, incapable or involved in violations, and when preserving evidence or carrying a survivor’s testimony entailed genuine personal risk.
Recognising that contribution does not give any international or local organisation immunity from criticism. An organisation demanding transparency from the state must itself be transparent. One calling for accountability must accept scrutiny. And one speaking on behalf of victims should be able to show that victims actually helped define its priorities, rather than being used to justify a proposal written before anyone listened to them.
Funding Is Not an Accusation—but It Is Not Neutral
Debate often falls into one of two extremes: treating every international grant as a conspiracy, or treating funding as a politically neutral technical resource. Neither position is accurate.
Donors do not provide money in a vacuum. Every donor has policies, budget cycles, administrative requirements, diplomatic considerations and preferred outcomes. Calls for proposals normally define eligible subjects, project duration, target groups, expected outputs and indicators by which success will be measured.
When organisations become wholly dependent on this system, Syrian priorities may begin to adapt to the vocabulary of grants instead of grants adapting to Syrian needs. The same fashionable terminology appears in dozens of proposals; conferences, trainings and studies are repeated; old activities are repackaged under new headings. Meanwhile, long-term and expensive needs may remain unfunded because they do not produce quick figures for a donor report.
The OECD has identified comparable imbalances in international funding structures, including limited visibility for local actors over financial flows, partnership decisions and the role of intermediaries. Local organisations may be treated as implementers rather than equal decision-makers. The OECD consequently recommends clearer reporting on how resources reach local actors and stronger accountability to local communities—not only to donors. OECD Practical Guidelines on Transparency and Accountability, 2026.
The problem does not begin merely with receiving money. It begins when organisational survival takes precedence over the cause the organisation was created to serve, and when activities are designed to satisfy donor indicators rather than create a demonstrable change in victims’ lives and access to justice.
A Victim Is Neither a “Beneficiary” nor Raw Material for a Project
One of the greatest dangers facing transitional justice is the conversion of victims from rights-holders into a “target group,” and from partners in decision-making into a source of testimony, photographs and compelling stories.
A survivor may be asked to recount the same experience to several organisations. Forms are completed, interviews recorded and photographs taken. The grant then ends, while the person who testified is left without answers. Where was the statement stored? Who may access it? Was it transferred elsewhere? Will it be used in a public report or criminal investigation? Can its author correct the record or withdraw consent?
A victim is not portable evidence, an image in an annual report, or a device for giving an organisation moral legitimacy. Victims hold rights to truth, justice and reparation, as well as independent rights to privacy, security, informed consent, access to information and participation in decisions affecting their cases.
The United Nations Secretary-General’s Guidance Note describes transitional justice as a people-centred process that should be designed through meaningful participation by affected communities rather than imposed as a ready-made technical model. UNDP guidance likewise stresses that people are not simply users of justice services but co-creators of solutions, drivers of accountability and participants in monitoring outcomes. UN Secretary-General’s Guidance Note on Transitional Justice; UNDP Guide to People-Centred Justice and Security.
This principle requires a shift from merely consulting victims to involving them in setting priorities, selecting programmes, monitoring expenditure, evaluating impact, submitting complaints and objecting to uses of their names or stories that they did not authorise.
Who Gave an Organisation the Right to Represent Victims?
Standing beside victims does not make an organisation their legal or political representative. An organisation may offer important services and possess substantial expertise, but it cannot grant itself a general mandate to speak for thousands of people merely because it organised listening sessions or implemented a project in a particular region.
Representation needs a discernible basis: election, explicit mandate, genuine membership, or a continuing consultative mechanism through which representatives can be questioned and replaced. Selecting a limited number of participants for a closed workshop and presenting its conclusions as “the voice of victims” does not create legitimate representation.
Even victim-led organisations are not exempt from these questions. Whom do they represent? How is leadership chosen? Are there elections, general meetings and financial reports? Can women, families of the missing, survivors abroad and less visible communities participate? Are dissenting views heard within the organisation?
State monopoly over decision-making must not be replaced by a new organisational monopoly. Transitional justice belongs neither to government nor to NGOs.
International Organisations: Expertise Does Not Confer Guardianship
International organisations can provide comparative expertise, funding, training, protection and access to international mechanisms. In some phases, their presence may be essential for professional standards and independence from domestic polarisation.
But an international expert is not the holder of the mandate, and foreign experience is not a ready-made formula. What worked in Colombia, South Africa, Bosnia or Sierra Leone cannot simply be imported into Syria after changing institutional names. Every process reflects its own constitutional structure, balance of power, pattern of crimes, judicial capacity and political settlement.
Comparative expertise should help Syrians make decisions; it should not replace their decisions.
The risk becomes acute when an international organisation acts as a mandatory intermediary between donors and local groups, retaining decision-making authority, visibility and a substantial portion of the resources while Syrian partners reach victims, collect data, perform activities and assume security risks.
Recent guidance on locally led development notes that international intermediaries may retain funding, visibility and decision-making power, while information about onward transfers to local partners remains incomplete. The solution is not to abolish every intermediary but to require disclosure of the cost of intermediation, the resources transferred, partner-selection criteria, and the distribution of authority and risk. OECD Guidelines on Reimagining the Role of International Intermediaries.
Being Local Does Not Automatically Mean Being Honest or Representative
Nor is every local organisation necessarily representative of society or protective of national decision-making. Some may reproduce the very practices they criticise in international institutions: concentrating authority in one person, recruiting through personal networks, concealing budgets, repeatedly selecting the same beneficiaries, and using a human-rights title to gain funding and influence.
An organisation may be created for a single grant, or an institution with no prior expertise may suddenly adopt transitional justice because funding has moved in that direction. Projects and studies may be repeated without coordination or publication, potentially allowing more than one donor to pay for substantially the same material or activity.
These situations should not be labelled corruption without evidence, and no individual or organisation should be accused of trading in victims’ suffering merely because of suspicion or political disagreement. But the absence of public evidence does not require blind trust. The legal response is not defamation; it is an disclosure, audit and complaints framework that makes verification possible.
The description “local organisation” should be the beginning of examining legitimacy and accountability, not the end.
Documents and Testimony Are Not the Organisation’s Private Property
Syrian and international organisations hold highly sensitive data: names of victims and witnesses, detention locations, images of remains, medical records, grave locations, family relationships, copies of documents, accounts of sexual violence, and information that may identify suspected perpetrators.
These records are not commercial assets. They must not be used to attract funding or automatically shared with every partner or donor. Transfer to a state body, international mechanism or third organisation requires a clear legal basis, a risk assessment and consent appropriate to the intended purpose, unless a specific and necessary legal exception applies.
The ICRC Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action emphasises the application of data-protection principles when processing information about people affected by crises, particularly in dangerous settings and through new technologies. ICRC Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action.
Every organisation working on transitional justice should therefore:
- define the purpose of collection in advance;
- obtain informed and specific consent wherever possible;
- avoid collecting information beyond what is necessary;
- separate data used for humanitarian support from material intended for criminal investigation;
- define who may access, transfer and copy information;
- encrypt data and maintain a breach-response plan;
- inform data subjects about intended recipients;
- establish retention, destruction and archival rules;
- allow correction or withdrawal within legally possible limits; and
- prohibit fundraising or media use of testimony and images without separate consent.
The closure of a project or organisation must not leave an archive without responsibility. The future of data and documentation should be determined from the beginning, and transfer to new staff or institutions must not occur through an unreviewed internal decision.
Documentation Is Not a Criminal Investigation
An organisation may collect information with judicial value, but that does not turn it into a prosecutor or court. It should not present individuals as criminals before judgment or publish names in a manner that violates the presumption of innocence or endangers witnesses.
A human-rights interview, a psychosocial session, an advocacy recording and a statement intended for criminal proceedings have different purposes, methods and safeguards. If an organisation fails to explain that distinction, it may expose a victim to repeated questioning, create apparent inconsistencies, weaken chain of custody, or make promises of prosecution it has no authority to fulfil.
Organisations collecting potential evidence should therefore follow professional protocols, employ trained personnel and coordinate through a legal framework protecting the evidence, its source and the rights of any person against whom it may later be used.
Protecting National Decision-Making Without Closing the Door to Support
National ownership does not mean allowing government to monopolise transitional justice. Independence from government does not mean transferring control to donors. Syria needs a plural framework in which victims, families of the missing, civil society, legal professionals, courts and public authorities participate under published mandates, mutual oversight and conflict-of-interest rules.
A practical package of safeguards could begin with the following measures.
First: A Public Register of Funding and Projects
Every organisation working on transitional justice should disclose:
- the project name, implementing body, donor, value and duration;
- intermediaries and the share of funds they retained;
- local partners and their respective allocations;
- target regions and communities;
- objectives, outputs and measurable results;
- studies and materials produced with public or donor funds; and
- instances of joint or repeated funding.
Publication need not expose security information or victims’ data. It should expose the movement of money and decision-making authority.
Second: Separate Funding from the Right to Represent
A donor should not effectively grant an organisation a seat on an advisory body merely by funding it, and the size of a grant must not determine the organisation’s political influence. Civil-society and victim representatives should be selected through public procedures based on competence, genuine constituency and disclosed conflicts of interest.
Third: Independent Victims’ Councils
Transitional justice institutions should be accompanied by victim councils or forums with diverse representation and clear election or mandate rules. Their budgets should be sufficiently independent and not controlled entirely by the organisations they are expected to monitor.
Fourth: Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest
Officials, commission members, experts and organisations should disclose financial ties to donors and contractors, simultaneous positions in bodies with overlapping interests, relevant family or professional relationships, movement between public office and funded projects within the same field, and any financial benefit arising from a decision, referral or partnership.
Fifth: An Independent Complaints Mechanism
An internal email address is not enough. Victims, staff and partners need a safe and independent channel to complain about misuse of data, exploitation, discrimination, conflicts of interest, corruption or retaliation against whistleblowers. Procedures, expected timelines and general outcomes should be published while protecting privacy.
Sixth: Financial and Professional Audit
A financial audit may prove that receipts exist; it does not prove that a project was necessary or effective. Financial scrutiny should be combined with independent professional evaluation asking whether victims participated in design, whether activities duplicated other work, whether resources reached the declared groups, whether data were protected, whether access to justice improved, whether results survived the end of funding, and whether beneficiaries could criticise the project without losing support.
Seventh: Measure Results, Not Activities
The number of workshops, attendees and reports is not evidence of impact. A successful programme helps a family discover the fate of a missing relative, preserves evidence lawfully, enables a victim to reach a court, restores a right, reforms an institutional procedure, or prevents a violation from recurring.
Accountability Is Not a War on Civil Society
Demands for NGO accountability can be misused to restrict civic space or discredit human-rights defenders. This critique must therefore never become a pretext for security interference, arbitrary licensing, forced disclosure of victims’ data or punishment of independent organisations.
The objective is not to place civil society under executive control but to subject all actors to fair and independent rules: government, the national commission, international organisations, local organisations, donors and intermediaries.
The Core Humanitarian Standard defines accountability as the responsible use of power, with affected communities at the centre of decisions and able to hold supporting organisations to account. The same principle is directly relevant to transitional justice. Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability, 2024.
Legal View: No Immunity Under the Banner of Victims
Transitional justice is not a grant. A victim is not a budget line. An organisation does not own the cause merely because it obtained funding before others.
Not every grant is corruption, not every organisation is a trader, and international expertise is not necessarily guardianship. But good intentions do not remove the duty to disclose. Human-rights work does not confer immunity from audit. Being local does not prove representation, and being international does not grant the right to lead.
Every institution that collects money, data or influence in the name of victims should be held to a higher standard of transparency, not a lower one. It is untenable for an organisation to demand that the state disclose budgets and decisions while treating its own funding conditions, expenditure and partnerships as an internal matter.
Funding that enables victims to exercise agency supports justice. Funding that uses their presence to legitimise decisions taken without them reproduces the same power relationship that transitional justice is supposed to dismantle.
If government alone controls the process, justice becomes a political instrument. If donors control priorities, it becomes an extension of donor policy. If organisations monopolise it, it becomes a closed professional sector. If it receives no resources or institutional support, it remains an ethically compelling but powerless discourse.
The answer is not to exclude every actor. It is to prevent any actor from owning the process. Expertise must serve decision-making, funding must serve rights, and organisations must serve the people whose cause gives their work legitimacy.
The final decisions should remain with a society that knows what was done to it and with victims who are not summoned to decorate projects, but who participate in designing, monitoring and challenging them.
The central question for every body working in the name of transitional justice should therefore be not only: How much did you spend, and what did you implement? It must also be: Who authorised you to set the priorities, who can hold you accountable, and what remains for victims when the funding ends?
