Restitution as a form of restoring justice in the context of transitional justice: philosophical and legal dimension

The article examines restitution as a form of restoring justice in transitional justice in a philosophical and legal dimension. It emphasizes that transitional justice is formed in a situation of a fundamental break between the normatively declared legal order and the actual practice of mass human rights violations, as a result of which law loses its usual stability and acquires a reflexive character. In this context, restitution is seen not as a universal or unconditionally effective mechanism for restoring justice, but as a problematic tool for legal “correction of the past.” It is argued that the classical understanding of restitution as a return to the state that existed before the violation is limited in situations of mass and systematic human rights violations, a significant part of which are irreversible. It is shown that under such conditions, restitution can take on the characteristics of a normative fiction if it is absolutized and separated from other components of transitional justice. Critical philosophical and legal approaches, according to which restitution can create the illusion of restoring justice and replace the moral responsibility of the state with formal legal gestures, are analyzed. At the same time, it has been proven that the awareness of the fundamental impossibility of full restitution does not negate its significance but, on the contrary, reveals its normative and symbolic potential. Restitution is justified as a form of legal recognition of injustice caused, aimed at establishing the limits of what is permissible for public authorities and restoring trust in the rule of law. It has been determined that, in the philosophical and legal dimension, restitution appears as a space of tension between the possible and the impossible, between the normative requirement of justice and the limitations of law in overcoming the consequences of radical evil. It has been concluded that, in the context of transitional justice in Ukraine, restitution should be considered as a fundamentally limited but normatively necessary element of the multidimensional architecture of restoring justice, which is implemented in conjunction with other legal and extra-legal means aimed at recognizing responsibility, preserving public memory, and forming institutional guarantees against the recurrence of mass human rights violations.