Building a Better Truth Commission

Lisa Laplante has a new article in print: Transitional Justice and Peace Builduing: Diagnosing and Addressing the Socioeconomic Roots of Violence Through a Human Rights Framework, 2 Int’l J. Transitional Justice 331 (2008).  (Subscribers can download a copy from the journal’s website.)  In recent years, many nations have used “truth commissions” to ease the transition from oppressive to more democratic regimes: the commissions investigate and report about human rights abuses in the old regime, with the idea that an honest accounting of the past may facilitate reconciliation and reform.  However, as Lisa observes, there are distressing signs of renewed civil unrest and violence in a number of nations that have employed truth commissions, including Chile, South Africa, and Guatemala.  In her article, Lisa argues that the mission of truth commissions ought to be reconceived such that the commissions would address a broader range of human rights violations, including violations of economic, social, and cultural rights.  Social conflict and violence are often connected to deep-seated socieconomic inequalities.  If truth commissions do not recognize a human rights dimension to these inequalities, Lisa suggests, then they will fail to get at the root cause of the more traditional types of human rights violations on which they have focused their attention.  And failing to address root causes means that social conflict may continue unabated, despite all of the effort otherwise put into achieving reconciliation.

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