International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   When truth commissions first appeared in Latin America in the 1980s, they did not receive a great deal of attention. Some 25 years later, truth commissions have been established in over 35 countries worldwide and have become a widely discussed phenomenon. Truth commissions are temporary institutions designed to investigate patterns of political violence under a prior regime as part of a process of political change ( Hayner 2001 ). Once largely viewed as a “second best” alternative in contexts where prosecuting past abuses was deemed unrealistic, truth commissions are now promoted as tools to further an impressive range of goals, including democratization, reconciliation, human rights protections, and individual healing. The vast literature on truth commissions may be categorized into three broad debates. The first centers on the question of what is driving the development of truth commissions. A second debate centers on the moral claims associated with truth commissions. More recently, scholars have developed studies to analyze the impact of truth commissions. There is very little consensus regarding the causes, consequences, and moral implications of truth commissions. Some view the proliferation of truth commissions as having been driven by the growing strength of human rights norms and advocacy, whereas others maintain that they merely function to ... log in or subscribe to read full text