Transitional Justice in Nepal: TRC, CIEDP and the 2024 TJ Act

Nepal's armed conflict, often called the People's War, began on 13 February 1996 (1 Falgun 2052 BS) when the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched an insurgency against the state, and ended on 21 November 2006 (5 Mangsir 2063 BS) with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) between the government and the Maoists. Over that decade, both state security forces and Maoist rebels committed grave abuses: unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture, rape and sexual violence, child recruitment and mass displacement.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in its 2012 Nepal Conflict Report, estimated that around 13,000 people were killed and more than 1,300 forcibly disappeared, figures broadly consistent with the documentation of the Nepali rights group INSEC. Government records compiled later list more than 17,000 conflict deaths. During parts of the conflict, Nepal recorded among the highest numbers of new enforced disappearances in the world.

Transitional justice — truth-seeking, prosecution of grave crimes, reparations and institutional reform — was written into the peace deal itself. The CPA committed both sides to publicise the whereabouts of the disappeared within 60 days and to establish a high-level Truth and Reconciliation Commission, commitments repeated in the Interim Constitution of 2007. In practice, delivering on those promises has taken Nepal nearly two decades and remains incomplete.

After years of delay and a court-challenged 2013 ordinance, Nepal's Legislature-Parliament passed the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, 2071 on 25 April 2014; it was published in the official gazette on 21 May 2014. The Act created two separate bodies: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for killings, torture, sexual violence and other gross violations, and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) for disappearance cases.

Both commissions were formed on 10 February 2015, with Surya Kiran Gurung as the first TRC chair and Lokendra Mallick heading the CIEDP. Their statutory functions include investigating conflict-era violations committed between 13 February 1996 and 21 November 2006, establishing and publishing the truth, identifying victims and perpetrators, recommending reparations, issuing victim identity cards, facilitating reconciliation where victims consent, and recommending legal action against perpetrators.

The commissions gathered an enormous caseload: the TRC registered 63,718 complaints of human rights violations, while the CIEDP registered roughly 3,300 complaints of enforced disappearance and in 2020 published a list of 2,506 people it considered disappeared. Yet neither body completed a single full investigation or recommended a prosecution in its first decade. Repeated term extensions followed, and from July 2022 until 2025 both commissions sat entirely without office bearers.

On 26 February 2015 (14 Falgun 2071 BS), in Suman Adhikari and others v. Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers, the Supreme Court of Nepal struck down key provisions of the 2014 Act as unconstitutional and contrary to international law. The court invalidated the Act's amnesty provisions insofar as they could cover serious human rights violations, and ruled that reconciliation between victims and perpetrators cannot proceed without the victim's free consent.

The court also held that criminal cases already before the regular courts could not be transferred to the commissions, confirming that the judiciary — not the commissions — decides criminal liability for conflict-era crimes. It ordered the government to amend the Act accordingly. Successive governments, however, left the law unamended for more than nine years, and the commissions worked under a legal cloud that victims' groups and the OHCHR said made credible outcomes impossible.

The ruling remains the constitutional benchmark for Nepali transitional justice: any law, commission decision or settlement that grants blanket amnesty for grave crimes such as murder of civilians, rape, torture or enforced disappearance is legally void. Only a handful of conflict-era cases have ever ended in convictions through the ordinary courts, such as the 2017 verdict against former army officers in the killing of teenager Maina Sunuwar.

On 14 August 2024 the House of Representatives passed the bill to amend the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act — commonly called the Transitional Justice Act 2024 or the third amendment — with near-unanimous cross-party support. The National Assembly endorsed it on 22 August 2024, and President Ram Chandra Paudel authenticated it on 29 August 2024 (2081 BS), finally responding to the Supreme Court's 2015 directive.

The amended Act divides conflict-era abuses into two categories. 'Serious violations of human rights' — rape and serious sexual violence, intentional or arbitrary killing of unarmed persons or civilians, enforced disappearance where the person's fate is still unknown, and inhuman or cruel torture — cannot be amnestied and may be referred through the Attorney General for prosecution in a Special Court of three High Court judges, with appeal to the Supreme Court. Other 'violations of human rights' may qualify for amnesty only if the perpetrator discloses the truth and the victim consents.

The law also recognises reparation as a right of victims, provides for a fresh three-month complaint-registration window for those left out earlier, and allows the Attorney General to seek sentences reduced by up to 75 percent for cooperating perpetrators, except in rape and serious sexual violence cases. Human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), called the Act a 'flawed step forward': a genuine advance, but one whose narrow definitions and steep sentence discounts risk functioning as disguised amnesty.

Acting under the amended Act, a recommendation committee headed by a former chief justice screened candidates, and in mid-May 2025 the government appointed new leadership: senior advocate Mahesh Thapa as TRC chairperson and Lila Devi Gadtaula, Nepal's first female chief secretary, as CIEDP chairperson, each with four members. Many victims' groups protested that the posts had been shared out among the major political parties, and some have challenged the appointments' legitimacy in court and before international bodies.

The reconstituted commissions issued fresh calls for complaints in May-June 2025, using the three-month window the 2024 Act provides for victims who could not file earlier. The response was substantial: by late August 2025 the TRC had received more than 11,000 new complaints, with officials expecting the total to pass 15,000, while the CIEDP received a much smaller number of new disappearance complaints. Around 3,800 of the new TRC filings came from conflict-era rape and sexual violence survivors, many submitted in sealed envelopes with code numbers to protect identities — a group almost entirely missing from the original 63,718 complaints, of which only 314 involved sexual violence.

The commissions must now verify tens of thousands of cases, recommend reparation packages and refer serious violations for prosecution — work that will decide whether the 2024 law becomes a genuine settlement or another postponement. Regulations, victim protection procedures and adequate budgets are the key tests to watch.

Complaints already registered with either commission remain valid; victims who filed earlier do not need to re-file and can quote their existing registration number when following up. New complainants — including families of the killed or disappeared, torture survivors, sexual violence survivors, the displaced and those recruited as children — should watch for official notices on trc.gov.np and ciedp.gov.np, since registration windows are time-bound under the Act.

Filing a complaint is free of charge, and no lawyer is required, though victims' organisations such as the Conflict Victims' Common Platform, Advocacy Forum and TRIAL International can help prepare files. Survivors of sexual violence can request strict confidentiality, including sealed submissions identified only by a code number, as used in the 2025 registration round. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also accepts human rights complaints and can be an additional avenue.

Under the Interim Relief Programme run mainly between 2008 and 2012, the government paid families of those killed or disappeared an initial NPR 100,000, later raised in instalments to a total of NPR 1 million (Rs 10 lakh) per family, alongside scholarships for children of the deceased and payments of up to NPR 200,000 for those disabled in the conflict. However, torture survivors and victims of conflict-era rape and sexual violence were excluded from interim relief altogether — one of the main injustices the amended law is meant to correct.

The 2024 Act makes reparation a legal right of victims, covering compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, and education, health and employment support, to be recommended by the commissions after case verification. Victims should keep their complaint registration numbers, apply for a victim identity card once the commissions issue them, and route relief queries through the commissions or the Ministry of Home Affairs, which inherited the conflict-victim relief functions of the former Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction. Because procedures are still being finalised under new regulations, victims should rely only on official commission notices and never pay intermediaries.