Amnesties, Accountability, and Human Rights

Chapter 3. The Pursuit of Truth

CHAPTER 3 The Pursuit of Truth We must deliberately sacrifice the formal trapping of justice, the courts and the trials for an even higher goal: Truth. We sacrifice justice, because the pains of justice might traumatize our country or affect the transition. We sacrifice justice for truth so as to consolidate democracy, to close the chapter of the past and to avoid confrontation.1 As with debates about democratic transitions and the obligation to prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations, those concerned with the right to truth and its relationship to amnesties were also precipitated by events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. This new emphasis on truth largely came in response to the nature of the repression in Latin America. In large part, there “the military governments did not openly kill their opponents,” but rather made them “disappear.”2 Such was the effectiveness of these disappearances that in very many cases the bodies of those presumed to have been murdered have never been found. In order to satisfy increasing demands for truth, more and more postauthoritarian civilian governments in Latin America began instituting truth commissions to investigate and document human rights violations. Precisely what a truth commission entails is a matter of some debate. According to Ruti Teitel’s definition, a truth commission is “an official body, often created by a national government, to investigate, document, and report upon human rights abuses within a country over a specified period of time.”3 By contrast, Priscilla Hayner defines them more expansively as “bodies that share the following characteristics: (1) truth commissions focus on the past; (2) they investigate a pattern of abuse over period of time, rather than a specific event; (3) a truth commission is a temporary body, typically in operation for six months to two years, and completing its work with the 76 Chapter 3 submission of a report; and (4) these commissions are officially sanctioned, authorized, or empowered by the state (and sometimes also by the armed opposition, as in a peace accord).”4 Geoff Dancy, Hunjoon Kim, and Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm note limitations associated with each of these definitions. Teitel’s, they argue, is “too vague to distinguish truth commissions from other kind of human rights institutions.”5 While they are more satisfied with Hayner’s definition and argue that by specifically focusing on the past “truth commissions do not investigate ongoing human rights abuses as human rights ombudsman might,” they maintain that her “emphasis on the completion of a report seems needlessly limiting.”6 They suggest, instead, that the production of a report ought to be a goal but not a requirement of a truth commission. Due to this absence of consensus on precisely what a truth commission is, analyses of truth commissions vary considerably. Nonetheless, general— although by no means complete—agreement exists on the assertion that the first truth commission was the Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearance of People in Uganda Since 25th January, 1971, established in 1974 to “investigate the accusations of disappearances at the hands of the military forces” during the early years of President Idi Amin’s rule.7 It was followed in 1982 with the first Latin American truth commission, Bolivia’s National Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances. However, the report of the Ugandan commission was never published, and the Bolivian commission was disbanded after more than two years of investigations without producing a report. As a result, Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling argue that “Argentina’s truth commission was the first major commission that would have a more lasting impact regionally and globally.”8 Many truth commissions, particularly some early examples, such as those established in Argentina and Uruguay, were accompanied by substantial and widespread amnesties. In the case of Uruguay, the establishment of the Investigative Commission followed just one month after an amnesty was granted providing release from prison for numerous political prisoners.9 This amnesty excluded state agents and sought to “provide reparations to political prisoners by . . . restoring property and funds that had been confiscated” from them, in addition to securing their release.10 However, the establishment of the commission was itself followed by two further amnesties. The first, granted in March 1985, covered all political, criminal, and military crimes committed since 1 January 1962 except “[o]ffences committed by Pursuit of Truth 77 police or military personnel, equiparados, and others who have subjected...