How, when and why do truth commissions improve human rights? This paper draws on the experiences of Brazil, Chile, Nepal, South Korea and South Africa. It concludes that although truth commissions are incapable of promoting stability and accountability on their own, they contribute to human rights improvements when they complement and enhance amnesties and prosecutions.
Most studies of truth commissions assert their positive role in improving human rights. Nevertheless, countries that have conducted a truth commission in the past tend to have higher levels of human rights abuses than those without one. On their own, truth commissions tend to emphasise either accountability or impunity. Accountability alone can jeopardise stability. On the other hand, impunity fails to create the legal, political or moral environment necessary to deter future human rights violations.
Only two combinations of transitional justice mechanisms show statistically significant, positive effects on human rights: (1) trials and amnesties and (2) trials, amnesties and truth commissions. When combined with amnesties and trials, truth commissions can achieve human rights goals by promoting a balance between stability and accountability. Although this balance can occur without truth commissions, they may fortify the balance.
In Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Nepal and South Korea, the use of truth commissions alone have tended to lead to an increase in social problems. Perpetrators do not always believe that a truth commission will protect them from prosecution, so it can fail to promote either the stability or the accountability necessary for improvements in human rights protection.
- In Brazil, the military responded aggressively to the government’s decision to hold a truth commission.
- In Nepal, the truth commission was too weak to bring stability and accountability.
- In South Africa, the truth commission threatened trials for those who did not come forward, but only a few perpetrators faced trials and even fewer were found guilty.
- In Chile, amnesty and truth commissions initially impeded progress on human rights. However, the truth commission produced information that eventually contributed to court cases that brought improvements. The Chilean truth commission made recommendations designed to boost human rights. Although the Senate blocked many of them, it eventually became less hostile to human rights reforms.
- The experience of South Korea shows that when truth commissions accompany trials and amnesties, they have a positive impact on human rights, even where they are only partially successful.
Success in human rights from truth commissions is likely to result from how they complement trials and amnesties, rather than from substituting for them. When a balance is struck between trials that deter human rights violations and amnesties that provide for the long-term stability of the political system, human rights violations tend to decline. Truth commissions added into this mix do not jeopardise the balance, but enhance it. They increase accountability without undermining amnesties that are the product of negotiated transitions from authoritarianism or war.
- Rather than limiting the investigation of criminal responsibility to individuals, truth commissions establish the systematic nature of violations, heightening awareness of past violence and potentially promoting human rights norms.
- They provide a blueprint for reform that, if implemented, should improve human rights protections.
- The prospects for the implementation of recommendations relate to a combination of the protection afforded by amnesties and the sanction provided by trials.
