Charles Taylor’s best account principle as the foundation of transitional justice in Colombia

Abstract

This article argues that Charles Taylor’s best account principle provides the epistemological and ontological foundation that Colombian transitional justice needs in order to answer the suspicion that it is a second-rate form of justice. According to this principle, whatever the best available account of our experience and practice cannot suppress without becoming unintelligible is real. Applied to the legal field, the principle reverses the burden of proof by requiring the retributive and legalist conception, which reduces justice to the crimepunishment binomial, to explain why truth, reparation, guarantees of non-repetition, and recognition should remain outside the concept of justice, even though they are ineliminable dimensions of the best account of the experience of victims of the armed conflict. The argument also delimits the principle’s scope, because it establishes the reality of what is at stake while requiring the complementary criteria supplied by Nancy Fraser’s participatory parity, Rainer Forst’s right to justification, and Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. The analysis focuses on the Comprehensive System for Peace and on the municipalities prioritized by the Territorially Focused Development Programs, hereafter PDET.