The essence of justice, as developed over many centuries by judiciaries and governments, is one of fairness, equality, lawfulness and order. Justice is entwined with individual perceptions of morality, ethics, acceptable norms, laws, penalties, standards and methods of implementation. Justice is therefore an essential element of the social contract whereby a population grants its rulers the authority to act on its behalf, provided those rulers protect both the individual rights of citizens and the common good and interest. 

The espoused system of justice is an ideal, seeking to deliver fair and equitable treatment of individuals, encompassing equal rights, protections and opportunities. However, a lot will depend on the prevailing political ideology and system. Authoritarian states, like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, often fail to uphold justice, despite their claims to the contrary. Individuals with dissenting views or minority identities in these nations may face repression, arrest, imprisonment and even judicial or extra-judicial execution.

Justice in war

In addition to issues of social justice and the array of law-and-order injustices, there is also the issue of justice in the area of armed conflict. A party engaging in war must demonstrate a just cause, justify that war is the last resort after exploring peaceful options, declare war through proper authority, act with good intentions, have a reasonable chance of success, and ensure that the means used align proportionately with the perceived threat and declared objective.

In addition, parties in armed conflict must take the utmost care to prioritize the safety of civilians and to apply humanitarian principles. For example: no deliberate murder or other atrocities against unarmed civilians; no taking of hostages or harming them; no collective punishments of civilians as proxy targets for enemy combatants; no indiscriminate use of bombs, rockets or weapons of mass destruction; no targeting of hospitals, schools, water, fuel and power supplies, food and medical supplies; no denial of safe passage out of combat zones for civilians and priority medical patients; no forced detention, displacement or expulsion of civilians; and no expropriation or theft of land or other assets of the civilian population, whether by state agencies, interest groups or individuals.

The law of war has four guiding principles or requirements:

1. Distinction: distinguish as far as possible between combatant targets and civilians.

2. Proportionality: prevent excessive loss of life or damage incidental to an attack, disproportionate to military advantage.

3. Military Necessity: target only existential and potential military threats.

4. Avoidance of Unnecessary Suffering: prioritize humanitarian criteria.

Regrettably, history shows that observation of the law of war regarding civilians is often more in breach. As Bård Drange suggests, victims may have a long struggle to obtain any justice. Combatants often disregard rules, sought to justify their actions and ignored potential war crime charges. Some even cynically argue that they scrupulously observe the four guiding principles despite compelling evidence to the contrary which they deny. Putin’s war on Ukraine and the Israel–Hamas war are contemporary examples.

Of the two identifiable parties to a dispute or conflict, is the position of one wholly just and the other’s position wholly unjust. In other words, is justice in war zero-sum? Sometimes such an unequivocal judgment may be warranted, but quite often both parties may reasonably claim to have suffered injustice at the hands of the other. Responsibilities, liabilities and evaluations under agreements, contracts, laws and norms guide judicial decisions, which might differ from public opinions, partisan stances or populist views.

Nevertheless, in some of the worst cases of injustice, a “zero-sum” argument is precisely what protagonists relentlessly assert. The party with more power typically vehemently asserts its exclusive rightfulness, portraying itself as a paragon of virtue and godliness. Simultaneously, they depict the other party as despicable, pathological liars, entirely untrustworthy and devoid of any redeeming qualities, creating a narrative that attempts to justify their own grievances while vilifying the opposition. Each party may develop an immutable view that justice can only be served by the total annihilation of the other, figuratively if not literally.

In high-stakes disputes, hyperbolic propaganda reigns. In today’s world of instant communication and social media, winning the propaganda battle often means claiming an exclusive right to justice, even if, impartially speaking, it is unfounded. 

Historical injustices

When we look retrospectively at historical injustices, we encounter at least two main problems:

1. Cognitive, emotional and motivational biasing. The”’truth” becomes distorted by knowledge limits, partiality, prejudice and purpose of the observer.

2. Causation, forensic accountability and attribution of blame for events, whether in the recent or more distant past. Whereas it is often relatively easy evidentially to attribute causation, partisan arguments are likely to creep into judgments on responsibility and blame.

Things become far murkier the further back in time one examines. Historical revisionism and retrospective rationalization are likely to play a part. Parties may well introduce degrees of fiction and exaggeration into their accounts of past or present situations or events in order to bolster their present claims for justice or to deny the claims of others.

The curse of slavery and ethnic subjugation was normalized for thousands of years by many nations. Many argue that assigning blame and seeking reparations from specific nations in contemporary times proves futile and unjustified, appearing more as an act of retribution than genuine justice. Historical regression has no bounds, and for those demanding reparation, who is to say how far back any alleged obligation should go?

For example: Should the UK make reparation claims against the Italian government for the subjugation, including slavery, of its native population for over 400 years by the Roman Empire? Similarly, should it claim against the French government for the Norman invasion and conquest, including quasi-enslavement of the English peasantry, from 1066 onwards?

Should multiple European countries lay claims against Morocco for the kidnapping and enslavement of their citizens in the 17th century by the Barbary pirates? What about all those peoples and countries conquered and subjugated by Spain for centuries in the Americas — aren’t they entitled to compensation? The absurdity speaks for itself.

Nevertheless, there are many unresolved injustices in more recent history that warrant serious attention. Health care inequalities, wrongful convictions, wrongful deportations, the Rohingya massacres in Myanmar, the opioid addiction crisis, the political curbing of judiciaries, war crimes in Ukraine — the list is endless.

From a wide spectrum of injustices, I will examine two topical ones. The two divergent cases illustrate some of the characteristics of injustice and the difficulties faced by victims in obtaining justice.

Case 1: The UK Post Office’s ongoing Horizon scandal

The Post Office Horizon scandal, lasting more than 20 years, has been described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK legal history.” In addition to its own larger stations, the UK Post Office contracted with a substantial number, approximately 9,000, of small shopkeepers, particularly in small towns and villages, to provide postal services within their premises. These sub-postmasters are contractually liable for any accounting shortfall involving “carelessness or error”. 

In the late 1990s, the Post Office decided to convert its Horizon IT system for the payment of state pensions and benefits into a comprehensive service. Horizon went live in 2000, and within two months large, unexplained accounting variances were being reported at sub-Post Offices. The Post Office then invoked the contract clause for liability for deficits, asserting that “carelessness or error” on the part of the sub-postmaster was the only possible cause. 

The number of such cases escalated, with alleged deficits ranging from £1,000 ($1,227) to tens of thousands of pounds and, in one case, over £1 million ($1.227 million). Over the next few years, the Post Office racked up over 700 such alleged cases in which sub-postmasters were coerced into covering alleged deficits and typically were sacked from their Post Office roles. In some cases, the Post Office launched criminal prosecutions for such alleged offenses as theft, fraud and false accounting, and many sub-postmasters were convicted on the basis of “fool-proof Horizon” evidence and jailed and/or fined.

As the number of cases mounted, both the Post Office and its Horizon software provider Fujitsu steadfastly maintained that the software was “absolutely accurate and reliable” and that all the actions against sub-postmasters with shortfalls were fully justified. Nevertheless, by 2012, a growing number of MPs concluded that both the technical reliability of Horizon and the integrity of the Post Office’s and Fujitsu’s senior management were in question.

By 2015, the House of Commons business committee summoned the Post Office’s chief executive, Paula Vennells, to account for why her previous pledge to resolve the Horizon debacle had not been met. Richard Brooks and Nick Wallis reported that her claim to be running a “caring” business and having “no evidence” of any miscarriages of justice was met by “barely disguised derision” by committee members, one of whom described the Horizon affair as a “shambles”. The Post Office and Fujitsu continued to maintain their “paragons of virtue” position and to deny that Horizon was in any way faulty or responsible for the errors and the false charges, false convictions and all the damage to the lives of the sub-postmasters.

However, in March 2017, the High Court of Justice granted a group litigation order to 555 sub-postmasters to sue the Post Office. Over the next two years, in a series of trials and appeals to overturn judgments against them, the Post Office lost in every instance and came in for excoriating criticism by judges. In one judgment in March 2019, a judge described the Post Office as “aggressive,” attempting “to put the court in terrorem,” seeking to “obfuscate matters, and mislead me,” “obdurate” and guilty of “oppressive behavior.”

The judge found the contractual relationship to be unfair in its coercive disadvantage to sub-postmasters. The Post Office then attempted to have him removed for alleged bias and, when this failed, they lodged an appeal. The appellate judge rejected this appeal outright, describing the appellants’ arguments as “misconceived,” “fatally flawed,” “demonstrably wrong” and “without substance”. He stated that the appeal had been based “on the idea that the Post Office was entitled to treat [sub-postmasters] in capricious or arbitrary ways which would not be unfamiliar to a mid-Victorian factory owner.”

Evidence submitted by senior Fujitsu witnesses for the defense was systematically discredited and shown as false, revealing a “party line” conspiracy over many years to hide evidence of the fundamental flaws of the Horizon product that had led to the false charges and convictions. The courts noted that the two organizations had cheated the litigants and lied to them, and that the Post Office’s approach consisted in “bare assertions and denials that ignore what actually occurred … [and] amount[ed] to the 21st-century equivalent of maintaining the earth is flat.”

Following the judgments, the Post Office initially agreed to pay £57.75 million ($72 million) in the settlement, plus its own costs, with the then expected total to exceed £90 million ($110 million). Taxpayers footed the bill since the Post Office operates as a public entity.

Subsequently, hundreds of other victims sought compensation under related schemes, and in 2023 the government announced that each person wrongfully convicted would receive £600,000 ($785,000) from the government. However, overturned convictions (93 so far) are a minority, leaving hundreds of other victims denied full justice. Some have already died, some face destitution, and some have committed suicide attributed to the shame and hardship inflicted on them by wrongful conviction, imprisonment and fines. Justice delayed is justice denied.

In addition, sub-postmasters were authorized to pursue the Post Office for malicious prosecution. More recently, the chair of the Public Inquiry into the scandal cautioned senior officials from the Post Office and Fujitsu that their persistent delay in providing crucial documents might result in criminal sanctions against them. These include perverting the course of justice. Recently, another 50 sub-postmaster victims came forward and have been added to the police investigation into the Post Office for potential fraud and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Many people argue that key figures involved in creating and perpetuating the scandal over so many years should be prosecuted on indictment. The most prominent would be the disgraced former chief executive (and former priest), Paula Vennells, who sanctioned the long-term policy of prosecuting the sub-postmasters and contributed to the cover-up by deliberately misleading and not cooperating with a parliamentary committee over several years of their inquiry into Horizon.

Case 2: The Israeli–Palestinian conflict and territorial rights

If ever there were a case of national and individual injustice, the long-standing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and their respective rights must surely rank among the most thorny and intractable. I can only attempt to identify the essence of such an immensely complex problem and address the main injustices claimed by each party. Further, I will discuss the most fruitful prospect for a way out for both parties to obtain some justice and peaceful coexistence.

On October 7, 2023, armed Hamas terrorists from the Palestinian enclave of Gaza carried out a coordinated attack on Israel. Over 1,200 civilians were killed and some 240 were taken hostage. The sheer savagery of the Hamas attack shocked and enraged the world. People of all ages, from young children to the elderly and incapacitated, were killed, tortured and wounded in a frenzy of depravity.

In response, Israel launched a defensive campaign to root out and destroy the entire Hamas organization and military capacity in Gaza. At time of writing, the tragic toll on the Gazan civilians has reached at least 23,300 dead and a further 59,400 injured, along with an estimated 7,000 missing, according a January 10 Al Jazeera television broadcast citing Gaza’s health ministry. As the Israeli campaign continues, these numbers will certainly increase.

Israel insists that it has fully followed and respected the law of war and humanitarian requirements, especially the protection of civilians, despite the exceptionally high number of casualties. However, many independent observers, including UN bodies, the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warn that both Hamas on October 7 and Israel in its subsequent Gaza campaign appear to have committed war crimes. Indeed, some Israeli officials and others have asserted that there is no distinction between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians, even babies and young children and have likened them all to non-humans who must be eliminated. Extremists such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah talk in similar terms about Israeli Jews.