Transitional Justice in Fragile Context: Toward a Yemeni Model of Cumulative and Localized Redress. An Introduction to the “Path to Justice Forum”
By Fahd Saif
Executive Summary
Amid the second decade of protracted conflict that has torn apart the social and political fabric of the Republic of Yemen, the concept of “justice” is no longer a marginal cause buried in the stalled drafts of dialogue conferences but an existential necessity for restoring the foundations of both state and society.
This paper prepared specifically for the “Voices for Justice: Inspiring Pathways for Change” forum offers a radical deconstruction of conventional approaches to justice in the Yemeni context. This paper develops and critically examines two central propositions. First, that standardized, state-centric transitional justice frameworks—originally designed for consolidated post-authoritarian transitions—are structurally ill-suited to Yemen’s fragmented and ongoing conflict environment. Second, that any viable transitional justice process in Yemen must be reconceptualized around context-responsive, victim-centered, and locally embedded mechanisms capable of operating.
Drawing on prior experience in PartnersYemen’s workshop and project, participation in multiple justice-focused workshops, and an investigative reading and cross-analysis of human rights and economic data and reports, this paper moves beyond the statistical documentation of violations toward an analysis of the political economy of pain (In the Yemeni context, the political economy of pain means that the suffering of victims is not treated merely as a humanitarian issue, but is sometimes exploited within the struggle over legitimacy and interests). Moreover, by deconstructing the concept of “the victim” to include groups historically crushed by Yemen’s social structure long before being devastated by war, the paper sheds light on the geopolitics of grievance from the forgotten Tihama to land-contested Aden.
The paper concludes by presenting a roadmap for a hybrid and realistic justice model that combines local customary mechanisms (restorative justice) with urgent economic entitlements. It deliberately moves beyond the illusion of comprehensive international prosecutions in the foreseeable future, in favor of cumulative redress that begins from the bottom up. In this vision, justice transcends mere political reconciliation to encompass social and economic justice and equality.
The “path to justice” in Yemen is not a straightforward road. It is a difficult, winding journey as we march through accumulated violations, historical marginalization, minefields, looted lands, displacement and stolen assets. This paper offers a vision for building a possible, cumulative, and localized form of justice—one that restores the Yemeni citizen’s dignity as a human being before addressing their needs as a victim.
Deconstructing the Concept of the Victim
The first dilemma confronting any transitional justice pathway in Yemen lies in the reductionist definition of the “victim.” In official political discourse and within sponsored negotiation rooms from Kuwait to Stockholm and Muscat, the victim is often reduced to the “detained combatant,” the “imprisoned politician,” a statistical tally of those either killed or wounded directly, or forced disappearances.
This reduction constitutes a systematic exclusion of broad segments of Yemenis who are victims of structural violence, discrimination, economic deprivation, and social exclusion as rights-holders whose harm is no less consequential—even if it does not manifest through direct physical injury.
Structural Discrimination and Current Conflict Victim
There can be no genuine transitional justice without confronting the “original sin” embedded in Yemen’s social structure: the marginalization of the Muhamasheen (historically labeled “Akhdam”). Discrimination against this group is not an incidental by-product of the current war, but rather a deeply entrenched historical legacy, when a rigid caste system classified them as “servants by nature,” stripping them of property rights and equal citizenship. [i]
Since 2015, the ongoing war has shifted this marginalization from the social realm into the domain of silent grievance. Field reports from 2025 indicate that the Muhamasheen have paid an exorbitant price in the Yemeni conflict, as their extreme poverty and lack of tribal protection were exploited to turn them into cheap labor for the war. Many were forced into dangerous frontline logistical roles—transporting ammunition, digging trenches, burying and retrieving bodies from front lines—without training or legal protection, and were often abandoned during withdrawals. [ii]
Despite their token representation in the National Dialogue Conference, current justice pathways and debates entirely ignore them. Studies by research centers and organizations confirm that they have not been included in any reconciliation committees or consultations on reparations and compensation, particularly after 2014. [iii]This compels recognition of the Muhamasheen (Akhdam) as compound victims (historically, economically, and militarily) not merely as victims of war.
The Economic Victim and Women
The definition of the victim must also be expanded to include economic victims (those who have suffered without visible bloodshed). This includes the civil servant whose salary has been cut for years, the retiree who lost a lifetime’s worth of savings due to currency collapse, the child deprived of education because their family could not pay “levies” or “fees”, and those whose homes or business were destroyed or properties looted.
Yemeni women, in turn, have borne the burden of the “substitute victim”. In the absence of men (killed, detained, or fighting in front lines) women assumed the role of breadwinners within a collapsed economy. Simultaneously, they were subjected to unprecedented violations under Yemeni social norms, including detention, cyber extortion and moral defamation particularly targeting women human rights defenders and peacebuilders.
Burden of Silence
Arbitrary Detention and Enforced Disappearances has evolved from a security measure into an industry of financial and political extortion. Reports indicate an alarming escalation in targeting international organization and embassy staff in Sana’a during 2025, aimed at isolating Yemen and undermining civil society. Many detainees have been held for years, accompanied by systematic incitement against Yemenis working in local and international organizations. Transitional justice processes must not overlook these violations.
Some victims of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, abused women, and others who suffer grave violations often refrain from public testimony, either for fear of retaliation in areas controlled by competing authorities or out of fear of social stigmatization. With a divided judiciary and weak accountability mechanisms, many lack safe and credible platforms through which to assert their claims. Furthermore, the peace process prioritizes political stabilization over truth and accountability, signaling that justice may be deferred. As a result, silence in Yemen functions as a survival strategy—sustained by insecurity, legal uncertainty, and the normalization of impunity.
Statistical Map of Pain
Over nearly a decade of war, Yemen has developed a horrifying map of pain. Since the outbreak of the conflict, recent UN studies estimate that more than 377,000 Yemenis have died as a direct and indirect consequence of the violence and its resulting hardships.[iv] Thousands have been arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared, and tens of thousands have suffered physical and psychological injuries. Internal displacement has affected millions, with over 4.5 million internally displaced persons, 75% of whom are women. [v]
Justice policies cannot be built on general impressions; they must be grounded in a precise map of the most affected geographies, responsible actors, and patterns of violations. Based on the latest reports from the National Commission of Inquiry, Mwatana Organization, UN expert reports, and other monitoring bodies, the following picture emerges:
Local parties share responsibility for violations including landmine planting, indiscriminate shelling, arbitrary detention, asset confiscation, city sieges, home demolitions, enforced disappearance, land grabs, repression of press and civil freedoms, and administrative corruption. Regional and international actors, continue to perpetuate violations related to airstrikes, and abuses in Yemen. This dual local-international dimension defines the core challenge of transitional justice in Yemen. [vi]
Despite the existence of multiple statistical reports, figures often conflict regarding the scale of violations; an issue that itself contributes to a form of truth-obscuring. Compounding this is the absence of a unified national archive documenting violations, which represents a fundamental obstacle to transitional justice. Hence, the solution lies in establishing a unified national transitional justice archive to preserve collective memory and guarantee the right to truth.
The Landmine Catastrophe
Landmines top the list of weapons that continue to kill long after conflict ends, representing war’s most persistent legacy. The “Fields of Death” report (November 2024) presents a staggering statistic: 96% of documented landmine incidents are attributed to Ansar Allah (the Houthis).[vii]
Since the start of the war, landmines and cluster munitions have claimed 9,600 victims, the majority of whom are women and children, according to the Yemen Executive Mine Action Center. This toll places Yemen among the countries with the highest number of landmine casualties. [viii]
Geographically, Al-Hudaydah ranks highest in contamination, followed by Taiz, Al-Jawf, Haja and Marib. [ix]This means that Yemen’s “breadbasket” has been booby-trapped for decades, turning farmers and fishermen into permanent victims and obstructing economic recovery while deepening Tihama’s geographic grievance. Justice here requires obligating the offending party to hand over mine maps as a precondition for any settlement, and establishing a long-term international trust fund for de-mining and compensating victims by potential victims’ fund who continue to lose limbs even during ceasefires.
The Geopolitics of Justice and Political Economy of Pain
Grievance in Yemen is distributed along rigid geographic and political lines, with each region possessing its own narrative of pain and each victim facing a different perpetrator complicating the construction of a unified national memory. Shifts in wartime power balances have redrawn the geography of grievance, placing former victims and marginalized actors in positions of dominance. This transformation has produced a dangerous reality in which yesterday’s victim becomes today’s perpetrator, threatening the instrumentalization of justice in favor of victors.
Certain parties invoke the pain of their victims to strengthen their political or negotiating position, while other groups are marginalized. Files related to detainees and landmine maps are likewise used as bargaining chips, with the suffering of victims managed through the logic of trade-offs and mutual pressure. Justice becomes intertwined with interests, and recognition, resources, and attention are redistributed according to power dynamics. Thus, pain becomes part of the political equation—managed and instrumentalized rather than addressed fairly and comprehensively.
Justice has thus become politicized and geographically fragmented, transformed into a bargaining chip rather than a comprehensive national process. The central challenge is how to achieve non-selective justice within a redefined concept of power. The solution lies in a fair, national approach that subjects all actors to a single standard of redress through binding national principles and mechanisms.
Critiquing standardized international transitional justice frameworks: Why Do Ready-Made Templates Fail?
The Yemeni experience from the GCC Initiative (2011) to the present has demonstrated the futility of importing transitional justice models and imposing them on local realities. The 2013 Transitional Justice Law failed because it was designed as a political bargain among elites to divide immunity, not as a societal redress project, in addition to other factors. By restricting the temporal scope to 2011 and excluding grievances from 1994 and the Sa’dah wars, it produced selective justice rejected by victims.
Today, the same mistake is repeated through political settlements offering safe exits for new warlords in exchange for token compensation. Conferences and training programs have multiplied, creating awareness but remaining confined to elite circles, widening the gap between lofty recommendations and lived injustice. Reports have replaced accountability, while political vetoes obstruct any serious path toward international justice.
Correcting this requires localizing transitional justice, bridging the gap between abstract rights discourse and Yemeni realities, genuinely involving victims in policymaking, managing expectations honestly, and redirecting international support toward tangible initiatives on the ground.
The Dilemma of Economy and Reparations: Who Pays the Price of Justice?
Economic reparations constitute one of the most complex challenges in Yemen. The scale of suffering makes full individual compensation impossible in a collapsed economy, raising debates over individual versus collective reparations. A hybrid, multi-level approach is required, combining national compensation mechanisms or a victims’ fund with collective reconstruction programs in devastated and marginalized areas.
Equally critical is pursuing war profiteers and money-launderers who amassed vast wealth amid state collapse, while the majority of Yemenis descended into extreme poverty.
A Roadmap for a Realistic and Localized Justice Model
- Localizing Justice:
Despite the challenges facing the judicial system in Yemen, including weak judicial infrastructure and shortage of judges, the country possesses rich legal and cultural resources in formal judiciary systems, tribal customary law, and local dispute resolution mechanisms. These can adjudicate material damage and non-grave violations using customary norms, under state judicial oversight to ensure enforceability, while safeguarding against bias toward weaker groups.
- Economic Justice First Strategy
In a starving country, justice cannot precede survival. Developmental reparations must come first:
- Recovered Assets Fund: A joint international-Yemeni mechanism to recover stolen assets, dedicated exclusively to victim compensation.
- Positive Discrimination: Prioritizing reconstruction in marginalized areas as a compensatory right, not charity.
- The National Memory Archive
If prosecuting major perpetrators is politically impossible now, preserving truth is non-negotiable. A unified national archive of war violations must be established as a living memory and a foundation for future accountability.
- Institutional Reform: Dismantling the Tools of Violence
Non-recurrence requires dismantling the instruments of abuse through integrating armed formations into professional national institutions, applying rigorous vetting to exclude those implicated in grave crimes.
Conclusion
Yemen’s crisis is, at its core, a crisis of accumulated injustice. Decades of deferred grievances — including structural discrimination, land seizure and dispossession, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention, economic collapse, and the ongoing landmine catastrophe — have generated suffering that spans generations and regions. This paper has argued that standardized transitional justice models are structurally ill-suited to Yemen’s fragmented and ongoing conflict environment. Justice cannot be imported as a ready-made template, nor postponed as a secondary outcome of elite bargaining.
Instead, Yemen requires a cumulative and locally grounded model of redress — one that broadens the definition of the victim, confronts the political economy of pain, and moves beyond symbolic acknowledgment toward meaningful participation. In the absence of unified institutions, justice must advance incrementally: preserving truth where prosecutions are not feasible, prioritizing economic reparations where livelihoods are under threat, integrating local restorative mechanisms under the oversight of the state and the rule of law, and safeguarding collective memory through a national archive.
The path to justice in Yemen will not be linear, but it is indispensable. Without justice, ceasefire agreements risk becoming merely temporary pauses in a recurring cycle of grievances and impunity. With it, dignity can be restored and the foundations of sustainable peace gradually rebuilt.
[i] https://yemenfuture.net/researches/32205
[ii] https://yemenfuture.net/researches/32205
[iii] https://yemenfuture.net/researches/32205
[iv] [iv] https://www.bbc.com/arabic/live/59386653
[v] https://surl.lt/ehufsd
[vi] https://www.mwatana.org/posts-en/mwatana-documents-1499-violations-by-conflict-parties
[vii] https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/fields-death-ongoing-catastrophe-and-its-long-lasting-impact-enar
[viii] https://blogs.icrc.org/alinsani/2025/04/04/8047/
[ix] https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/fields-death-ongoing-catastrophe-and-its-long-lasting-impact-enar