A/HRC/21/46 main components of a transitional justice policy mentioning explicitly criminal justice, truth-telling, reparations and vetting. It furthermore stipulates that, far from being isolated measures, these mechanisms should be thought of as parts of a whole: “Where transitional justice is required, strategies must be holistic, incorporating integrated attention to individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or an appropriately conceived combination thereof” (para. 26). 21. The Special Rapporteur takes the four components of the mandate, truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence as a set of measures that are related to, and can reinforce, one another, when implemented to redress the legacies of massive human rights violations and abuses. Redressing the legacies of abuse means primarily giving force to those human rights norms that were systematically or grossly violated. 4 The resolution considers the measures to be also appropriate for redressing the legacies of serious violations of international humanitarian law. As such, the grounding of their legal obligation lies in the documents cited in the resolution and other relevant documents that spell out the legal obligations of States in the redress of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law. A functional analysis that takes seriously the ends that can be reasonably sought through the implementation of the measures can nevertheless provide useful guidance. 5 While arguably, they all serve the ultimate end of pursuing justice, a less abstract functional analysis that distinguishes between the immediate, mediate and final ends of the measures would say that the four measures can be conceptualized as assisting in the pursuit of two mediate goals, i.e., providing recognition to victims and fostering trust, and two final goals, i.e., contributing to reconciliation and strengthening the rule of law. 6 D. Comprehensive approach and interrelationship of the four elements 22. In the face of the immensity of the task of redressing the legacies of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law, the limited reach of each of the measures that form part of the mandate should be acknowledged from the outset. The weakness of each of these measures alone provides a powerful incentive to seek ways in which each can interact with the others in order to make up for their individual limitations. International experience, as well as research, suggests that the comprehensive implementation of the four components of the mandate provides stronger reasons for various stakeholders, foremost amongst them, the victims, to understand the measures as efforts to achieve justice in the aftermath of violations than their disconnected or disaggregated implementation. 7 4 5 6 7 See Pablo de Greiff, “Theorizing Transitional Justice”, in Transitional Justice: NOMOS LI, Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy and Jon Elster, eds., (New York and London, NYU Press, 2012). See also Pablo de Greiff, “Some thoughts on the development and present state of transitional justice”, Journal for Human Rights, vol 5, No. 2 (2011). The qualifiers “mediate” and “final” should not be understood primarily in temporal or chronological terms, but rather in terms of the causal (in)sufficiency of a particular measure to bring about the end attributed to it. The mediate aims of a measure are those aims which it is reasonable to think that the implementation of the measure may further, but whose accomplishment may also require a number of different measures. “Final ends” are those whose attainment is causally even more distant, and, therefore whose realization depends upon the contribution of an even larger number of factors, whose role, relatively speaking, increases in importance. See in detail Chapter III, section E, below. Morocco is an interesting test case of this claim, as it has implemented some of these measures, first in isolation from one another and, a few years later, in a more integrated fashion. From 1999 to 2001, 7