12.5 Nepal's Conflict-Era Transitional Justice

The 1996–2006 Nepalese armed conflict ("People's War"): Common Article 3's paradigm case on Nepali ground — the conflict crossing AP II's threshold in phases; both sides' violations documented (the disappearances — the conflict's signature wound, among the world's heaviest caseloads; the extrajudicial killings, torture, displacement; the Maoist side's abductions, extortions, the "people's courts"). The machinery: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA, 21 November 2006): the IHL anchoring — the parties' express commitment to Common Article 3, the Geneva Conventions and human- rights instruments; the agreed mechanisms: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission on Investigation of Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP); The Transitional Justice Act (Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, 2071 (2014)): the commissions' mandate and the reconciliation-reparation scheme — and its litigation: Suman Adhikari et al. v. Nepal — the Supreme Court's 2014/2015 judgments striking the amnesty-for-serious-crimes provisions and mandating victim-centred, international-standard re-legislation (the conflict- era crimes' amnesty bar) — implementation still awaited in the re-legislation's long travail; The Rome Statute and Nepal: the 2006 accession (the CPA-era signature) — complementarity's question for conflict-era cases (temporal jurisdiction from 2002); the TRC/ CIEDP investigations and the reparation machinery's slow birth; the victims' decades-long justice movement; The doctrinal assessment: the conflict as IHL's teaching case (Common Article 3's applicability conceded by the CPA itself); the transitional-justice dilemma —…