Psychosocial effects of participation in rituals of transitional justice: A collective-level analysis and review of the literature of the effects of TRCs and trials on human rights violations in Latin America

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Martín-Beristain ◽  
Darío Páez ◽  
Bernard Rimé ◽  
Patrick Kanyangara
2021 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Nekane Basabe ◽  
Darío Páez

This monograph aims to disseminate the results of various research studies carried out in the field of social and community psychology. The studies focus on efforts to build a culture of peace in post-conflict contexts and societies that have suffered collective and socio-political violence, with multiple and persistent human rights violations. Six studies on the psychosocial effects of transitional justice rituals from Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Basque country, Chile, and Ecuador compose this issue. This issue presents a series of results regarding the effects of reparation rituals and Truth Commissions, combining different methods and analysis strategies, including general population surveys, newspaper and social media content analysis, community intervention assessments and qualitative documentary analysis. Finally, two review books were included. First, a Peace Psychology Book that explores the implications and difficulties faced by societies that have experienced large-scale collective violence. Second, the problem of human rights violations and how to confront them, socio-political conflicts and the building of a culture of democracy and peace in Latin America are transversal axes of the chapters of this second book.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 99-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Huneeus

Since the detention of General Pinochet in London in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity, Chile's judges have sentenced more former officials of the military regime for human rights violations than judges of any other country in Latin America. This article argues that the prosecutorial turn reflects the judiciary's attempt to atone for its complicity with the dictatorship. The London arrest created pressure for prosecution of Pinochet‐era human rights violations; but it is the contest over the judiciary's legacy, as an important piece of postauthoritarian memory struggles, that explains why Chile's notoriously illiberal judiciary ceded to that pressure. By reconceptualizing judicial culture as contested, heterogeneous, and dynamic, this article opens the door to richer understandings of judicial politics, transitional justice, and the reception of international human rights.


Author(s):  
Jeremy Sarkin

This article explores the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the post-Libya era to determinewhether it is now an accepted norm of international law. It examines what RtoP means intoday`s world and whether the norm now means that steps will be taken against states thatare committing serious human rights violations. The building blocks of RtoP are examined tosee how to make the doctrine more relevant and more applicable. It is contended that theresponsibility to react should be viewed through a much wider lens and that it needs to bemore widely interpreted to allow it to gain greater support. It is argued that there is a need tofocus far more on the responsibility to rebuild and that it ought to focus on the transitionallegal architecture as well as transitional justice. It is contended that these processes ought notto be one-dimensional, but ought to have a variety of constituent parts. It is further arguedthat the international and donor community ought to be far more engaged and far moredirective in these projects.


Author(s):  
Kevin Hearty

Viewing Irish republican policing memory primarily through a transitional justice lens, this chapter critically examines how Irish republicans, as a principal party to the conflict, approach the difficult issue of ‘dealing with the past’ as both collective victims and perpetrators of human rights violations during the conflict. It will interrogate the range of divergent views within modern Irish republicanism on issues such as victimhood, truth recovery, ‘moving on’ and ‘dealing with the past’. In particular, it looks at how the memory of human rights violations framed the wider policing debate and led to a master narrative of ‘never again’ whereby the value of ‘remembering’ past abuses lay in helping to prevent future repetition. This is placed against a more general backdrop of the stop-start ‘dealing with the past’ process in the North of Ireland that has included the establishment, operation and subsequent replacement of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), the passage of the Civil Service (Special Advisers) Act (Northern Ireland), and proposals like the Haass/O’Sullivan document and the Stormont House Agreement.


Author(s):  
Joanna R. Quinn

This chapter examines the link between transitional justice and human rights. Atrocities such as genocide, disappearances, torture, civil conflict, and other gross violations of human rights leave states with a puzzling and often difficult question: what to do with the perpetrators of such acts of violence. Transitional justice takes into account the social implications of such conflicts. Its emphasis is on how to rebuild societies in the period after human rights violations, as well as with how such societies, and individuals within those societies, should be held to account for their actions. The chapter considers three paradigms of transitional justice, namely: retributive justice, restorative justice, and reparative justice. It also discusses the proliferation of the number of mechanisms of transitional justice at work and concludes with a case study of transitional justice in Uganda.


2006 ◽  
Vol 88 (861) ◽  
pp. 19-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Hazan

Truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, reparations, public apologies and other mechanisms of transitional justice are the new mantras of the post-cold-war era. Their purpose is to foster reconciliation in societies that have experienced widespread human-rights violations and to promote reform and democracy, the ultimate aim being to defuse tension. But to what degree are these mechanisms, which are financially and politically supported by the international community and NGOs, truly effective? Very little, in fact, is known about their impact. By examining the underlying hypotheses and workings of transitional justice and proposing a series of indicators to evaluate its results, this article helps to fill the gap.


Author(s):  
Umberto Tulli

AbstractThe article discusses the evolution from the 1966–1967 “first” Russell Tribunal, an unofficial and political gathering that censured the USA for its aggression in Vietnam, to the “second” Russell Tribunal, which took place in Rome and Brussels between 1974 and 1976 and put human rights violations in Latin America in the international spotlight. Both Tribunals shared a profound anti-Americanism and an explicit proximity to Third Worldism. Yet, there was also an important difference, since the language of human rights shaped only the “second” Tribunal. The article is mostly based on documentary sources held by the Fondazione Lelio and Lisli Basso in Rome. This choice is based on the importance Italian Senator Lelio Basso had for the Tribunal. Basso was the main organizer and the driving force of the Tribunal and coordinated many transnational groups in support of this event. Moreover, his intellectual reflections on decolonization as a revolutionary force and his fierce anti-Americanism offered a blueprint for the proceedings and the sentence of the Tribunal. Bringing together the recent literature on the emergence of human rights during the 1970s and that on European anti-Americanism, the article shows how some prominent European intellectuals and politicians appropriated human rights jargon to criticize American foreign policy and denounce its responsibilities for ongoing human rights violations in Latin America. In doing so, it argues that the human rights language renewed European anti-Americanism during the 1970s.


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