| Summary: | The project ‘Truth, Accountability or Impunity? Transitional Justice and the Economic Crisis’ completed a repository of policies of accountability in response to the post-2008 Great Recession in six European countries (Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal & Spain). The repository included recorded prosecutions of bank executives, office holders and politicians on charges related to white collar crimes and/or corruption in the lead up to the economic crisis. It also includes fact finding commissions (i.e. independent commissions of inquiry and/or parliamentary commissions of inquiry) designed to document patterns of policy and institutional failures that led to the economic meltdown, in the period between 2010-2018. The rationale for developing the repository was, first, to map the range of policies deployed and, second, to investigate potential variations in the national policies. In parallel with the development of the repository, the project included the conduct of approximately 133 confidential semi-structured interviews in Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, Washington D.C. (IMF) and Brussels (EU). These included interviews with prosecutors, judges, elected officials (e.g. former Prime Ministers, Ministers, MPs), unelected officials (e.g. policymakers at central banks, relevant ministries, EU bodies, senior IMF executives etc), NGO members, journalists, academics, defense lawyers and other informed stakeholders to understand the rationale and their attitudes towards policies of accountability. There is little emphasis in the extant literature on the role and impact of different mechanisms of accountability in post-crisis settings, so these interviews were expected to shed useful analytical light. Finally, with regards to the case selection six European countries with similar background conditions and exposure to the crisis but different policy responses, each representing a different approach to accountability.The comparative project applies concepts of transitional justice, namely, ...
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