A/HRC/4/62 page 12 enjoyment of social rights. Civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights are too strongly interdependent to be treated separately. Action on any one front alone is not likely to work. Accordingly, strategies in post-conflict societies must be comprehensive, including specific measures to address violations of economic, social and cultural rights and to realize these rights alongside civil and political rights. 34. A wide range of strategies are necessary to ensure accountability for past abuses and to construct a society in which those abuses are less likely to occur. While acknowledging that other strategies can be considered, the following section focuses on measures often adopted in post-conflict settings that seem particularly crucial to the protection and realization of economic, social and cultural rights and that have already shown their potential in this regard. This selective examination of a few mechanisms and processes should not be taken to diminish the importance of other measures, such as peacekeeping, security measures, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of ex-combatants, or reconciliation processes, all of which are vital for the prospects for sustainable peace in any context. 35. Transitional justice mechanisms14 are one of the obvious avenues for ensuring accountability for past abuses and establishing the true facts about crimes committed. Some of these mechanisms have already considered economic, social and cultural rights in their work. International criminal tribunals have also been investigating and determining accountability for violations of economic, social and cultural rights in some instances, although approaches to these rights have been neither systematic nor comprehensive. International criminal tribunals have found on several occasions that provided certain criteria are fulfilled, the “appropriation or plunder of property” and the “intentional or wanton destruction of private property including homes and business and public property including cultural monuments and sacred sites” may constitute acts of persecution amounting to crimes against humanity.15 In addition, penalties envisaged by the statutes of international courts include the ordering of the return of any property and proceeds acquired by criminal conduct to their rightful owners.16 36. Such cases illustrate that there is no fundamental legal or institutional obstacle to the judicial protection of economic, social and cultural rights and the provision of redress for any such violation under international criminal law. On this basis, the High Commissioner for Human Rights has encouraged the international community to make greater use of existing statutes to adjudicate economic, social and cultural rights violations and to consider the possibility of international criminal law ultimately reaching beyond its current focus on property 14 See definition in S/2004/616, para. 8. 15 See for example International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladic, amended indictment, case IT-95-5/18-I, 11 October 2002, count 3 (persecutions), para. 37; Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadzic, amended indictment, 31 May 2000, count 7 (persecutions), para. 34. 16 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, art. 23 (3); Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, art. 24.