¹ Teitel, Ruti, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16 (2003), pp. 69–94 Google Scholar.

² Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Eric, Truth Commissions and Transitional Societies (New York: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar; Bakiner, Onur, ‘Truth Commission Impact: An Assessment of How Commissions Influence Politics and Society’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 8: 1 (2014), pp. 6–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of Chile's first truth commission, see Ferrara, Anita, Assessing the Long Term Impact of Truth Commissions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

³ See for example Tricia Olsen, Leigh Payne and Reiter, Andrew, Transitional Justice in Balance (Washington, DC: USIP, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁴ Among others, Gready, Paul and Robins, Simon, ‘From Transitional to Transformative Justice: A New Agenda for Practice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 8: 3 (2014), pp. 339–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharp, Dustin N. ‘Emancipating Transitional Justice from the Bonds of the Paradigmatic Transition’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9: 1 (2015), pp. 150–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldorf, Lars, ‘Anticipating the Past: Transitional Justice and Socio-Economic Wrongs’, Social & Legal Studies, 21: 2 (2012), pp. 171–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greiff, Pablo de and Duthie, Roger, eds., Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections (New York: SSRC, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁵ See, inter alia, United Nations (UN) Updated Set of Principles to Combat Impunity (UN Doc. E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1); UN Basic Guidelines on the Right to Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law (UN GA Resolution 60/147), and reports by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparations and Guarantees of Non-recurrence to the UN General Assembly (UN Doc. A/69/518, 14 Oct. 2014); and to the UN Human Rights Council (UN Doc. A/HRC/27/56, 27 Aug. 2014 and UN Doc. A/HRC/21/46, 9 Aug. 2012).

⁶ Viz. the Victims and Land Restitution Law of 2011, and ongoing peace negotiations which have, unusually, explicitly foregrounded transitional justice concerns and the language of victims’ rights, most recently in interim justice and reparations agreements signed in mid-December 2015.

⁷ Argentina pioneered an explicitly rights based approach within particular dimensions (viz. the ‘right to truth’, Lapacó case, Inter-American Commission, 2000). The interconnection between dimensions has also been used to leverage advances at times of apparent stasis, as when the 1990s ‘truth trials’ used judicial processes to produce factual revelation even when amnesty still precluded punishment. It remains to be seen how the 2016 change in government may however affect a transitional justice policy process that had become increasingly politically partisan under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–15).

⁸ The powerful symbolic and reparatory effects of the Brazilian Amnesty Commission's ‘Memory Caravan’ hearings, acknowledging former political prisoners, have helped fuel wider truth and justice demands, paving the way for a fully-fledged official truth commission which reported in December 2014. Individuals associated with the Amnesty Commission have also promoted an active country-wide university TJ network and supported efforts by a handful of state prosecutors to open criminal cases for torture. See www.rlajt.com; or http://transitionaljusticeinbrazil.com/.

⁹ Huneeus, Alejandra, ‘Courts Resisting Courts: Lessons from the Inter-American Court's Struggle to Enforce Human Rights’, Cornell International Law Journal, 493 (2011), pp. 101–55Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The court typically insists on a strong duty to prosecute and punish, requiring ‘due expedition’ of judicial proceedings together with state acknowledgement (truth telling) and economic or symbolic reparations. See among others Inter-American Court cases La Cantuta v. Peru (2006); Almonacid (2006) and García Lucero v. Chile (2013); Gomes Lund v Brazil (2010); Gelman v. Uruguay (2013), and El Mozote v. El Salvador (2012).

¹¹ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), 2014, ‘The Right to Truth in the Americas’, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.152 Doc. 2.

¹² A fact often overlooked in debates over the relative merits of truth or justice. As Wilde remarks, for Chile, ‘[h]istorical truth was uncovered above all through the pursuit of justice’, Wilde, Alexander, ‘A Season of Memory’, in Collins, Cath, Hite, Katherine and Joignant, Alfredo (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Chile (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), p. 39Google Scholar. See also Accatino, Daniela and Collins, Cath, ‘Truth, Evidence, Truth: The Deployment of Testimony, Archives and Technical Data in Domestic Human Rights Trials’, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2016 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Conference ‘The Right to Truth, Justice and Reparations in Latin America’, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, 4 June 2013.

¹⁴ At least for Chile, the setting with which this author is most familiar. Expansive group agendas, particularly notable since 1998, now commonly include ‘verdad, justicia y reparación integral’ (truth, justice, and holistic reparations) or ‘verdad, justicia y memoria’ (‘truth, justice and memory’). Some groups have explicitly chosen to link historic demands to contemporary rights claims in a desire to strengthen both: see for example an access to truth campaign pursued by a network of Chilean memory site groups, available at www.londres38.cl.

¹⁵ All Chile's TJ policy innovations and modifications have been surrounded by, indeed driven by, competing right, left and military tensions as much as by enlightened elite policy-making. See below and Collins, Cath ‘Human Rights Policy under the Concertación’, in Siavelis, Peter and Sehnbruch, Kirsten (eds.), Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2014), pp. 143–72Google Scholar; or Collins, Cath, ‘Chile a más de dos décadas de justicia de transición’, Política, 51: 2 (2013), pp. 79–113 Google Scholar.

¹⁶ See for example official submissions to the Inter-American Court in the Almonacid and García Lucero cases (2006 and 2013), Universal Periodic Review submissions to the UN Human Rights Council (2009 and 2014), and authorities’ responses to the 2012 report of the UN Working Group on Forced and Involuntary Disappearances’ mission to Chile (on file with author).

¹⁷ Anne Pérotin refers to the ‘extreme discretion’ with which the political class proceeded on this issue in the 1990s, and José Zalaquett to a ‘reactive attitude’ in the same period. Pérotin-Dumon, Anne, ‘El pasado vivo de Chile en el año del Informe sobre la Tortura’, Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos 5 (2005)Google Scholar; and Zalaquett, José, ‘No hay mañana sin ayer: análisis de la propuesta del Presidente Ricardo Lagos sobre derechos humanos’, Estudios Públicos, 92 (Spring 2003), pp. 29–62 Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See the National Human Rights Institute, INDH (Institución Nacional de Derechos Humanos), Informe Anual 2013, available at www.indh.cl and the INDH's associated 2013 memorandum on the human rights subsecretariat draft bill available at http://www.indh.cl/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Minuta-subsecretaria-DDHH1.pdf-ok1.pdf.

¹⁹ Henceforth, the term ‘Valech II’ will be employed when specific reference to the 2011 iteration is needed, though ‘Valech’ will also be used generically, where appropriate, to refer to both iterations.

²⁰ Exceptions include Lira, Elizabeth and Loveman, Brian ‘Torture as Public Policy, 1810–2011’, in Collins, Hite and Joignant, (eds.), The Politics of Memory, pp. 91–132 Google Scholar (volume also published in Spanish as La política de la memoria en Chile: desde Pinochet a Bachelet, Santiago: UDP, 2014) and, in Spanish: Pérotin-Dumon, ‘El pasado vivo de Chile en el año del Informe sobre la Tortura’, and Zalaquett, ‘No hay mañana sin ayer’, Zalaquett, pp. 313–33.

²¹ For perspectives on the commission's origins see below, Wilde, ‘A Season of Memory’, and Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, ‘Torture as Public Policy, 1810–2011’, pp. 91–132 . Lira was a member of both iterations of the commission.

²² Taking the form of, for example, wiping criminal records for those whose only offence had been political opposition to the regime.

²³ Message by then-president Ricardo Lagos (2000–06), Valech report prologue, pp. 2 and 3, author's translation.

²⁴ Valech's initial 2004 round produced a substantial printed report accompanied by survivor lists. In 2005, appendices of newly recognised cases were added. The 2011 iteration produced only a victim list and accompanying statistics. See Observatorio DDHH (Derechos Humanos): ‘Taller Comisión Valech II – Aspectos Metodológicos’, available at www.derechoshumanos.udp.cl.

²⁵ Supreme Decree No. 1,040, of 26 Sept. 2003, Art. 5, establishes ‘reserve for all legal effects’ (author's translation), as does Law 20.405, of 10 Dec. 2009, Transitory Article 3, para. 6, subsection 1.

²⁶ Known since 2014 as the Observatorio de Justicia Transicional.

²⁷ Since 2008, Juan Pablo Delgado, Mayra Feddersen, Karinna Fernández, María Florencia González, Boris Hau, Rodrigo Hernández, Jennifer Herbst, Alice Pfeiffer, Antonio Poveda, Tabata Santelices, Maria Ignacia Terra, Camila Varela, and Paulina Zamorano. The project received initial funding support from the Ford Foundation and the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

²⁸ This development is both clearly visible and critically analysed in an abundant academic and practitioner literature, generalist and Americas-focused. See, among others, Buckley-Zistel, Susanne et al. (eds.), Transitional Justice Theories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; Par Engstrom, ‘The Inter-American Human Rights System and Transitional Justice in Latin America’, remarks to the conference ‘Putting the State on Trial’, Ulster University, Belfast, 17 Oct. 2013; Reátegui, Félix (ed.), Transitional Justice: Handbook for Latin America (Brasília: Brazilian Ministry of Justice/ ICTJ, 2011)Google Scholar; SLADI (Sociedad Latinoamericana de Derecho Internacional), ‘Justicia Transicional en América Latina: Primer Informe del grupo de trabajo’, 2011, available at https://www.academia.edu/2057882/Justicia_transicional_en_Am%C3%A9rica_Latina; Sikkink, Kathryn, The Justice Cascade (New York: Norton, 2011)Google Scholar; Ambos, Kai, Malarino, Ezequiel and Elsner, Gisela (eds.), Justicia de Transición (Montevideo: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009)Google Scholar, Roht-Arriaza, Naomi and Mariezcurrena, Javier Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ For now-extensive jurisprudence from domestic courts see Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF); Digest of Latin American Jurisprudence on International Crimes vols 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: DPLF, 2010, 2013), and Digest of Latin American Jurisprudence on the Rights of Victims (Washington, DC: DPLF, 2015).

³⁰ Leebaw, Bronwyn, ‘The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly, 30 (2008) pp. 95–118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McAuliffe, Padraig, ‘Transitional Justice's Expanding Empire’, Journal of Conflictology, 2: 2 (2011), pp. 32–44 Google Scholar.

³¹ In addition to the UN Rapporteur documents cited in footnote 5, see Cristián Correa, ‘Reparation Programs for Mass Violations of Human Rights’, in Reátegui, Transitional Justice, pp. 409ff. Correa argues strongly for coherence and mutual reinforcement between truth, justice and reparations measures to become a fundamental TJ design principle.

³² Many Iberoamerican legal systems allow victims, NGOs or civil society associations to act as direct complainants in the criminal as well as civil justice system. However, full state compliance is arguably now being interpreted as requiring ‘de officio’, state-initiated, prosecution. See, among others, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, García Lucero v. Chile, Sentence of 28 Aug. 2013, and UN Special Rapporteur Report to the UN Human Rights Council on Prosecutorial Prioritization Strategies in the Aftermath of Gross Human Rights Violations and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law (UN Doc. A/HRC/27/56, 27 Aug. 2014).

³³ Outer limits to the acceptable use of amnesty and similar devices are increasingly enforced in the Inter-American human rights system. See, particularly, Engstrom, Par and Hurrell, Andrew, ‘Why the Human Rights Regime in the Americas Matters’, in Serrano, Mónica and Popovski, Vesselin (eds.), Human Rights Regimes in the Americas (Tokyo: United Nations University, 2010), pp. 29–55 Google Scholar. The region's existing domestic amnesties have almost without exception been challenged or interpretively narrowed in recent years, while the frequency of their adoption as initial transitional devices also declines over time. See Collins, Cath, ‘The End of Impunity?’, in Palmer, Nicola, Clark, Phil and Granville, Danielle (eds.), Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2012), pp. 399–423 Google Scholar; Louise Mallinder ‘The End of Impunity?’ forthcoming, 2016; or Collins, Cath, Godos, Jemima García and Skaar, Elin (eds.), Transitional Justice in Latin America: The Uneven Road from Impunity towards Accountability (Routledge: forthcoming, 2016)Google Scholar.

³⁴ See de Greiff, Pablo (ed.), The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brazil's Amnesty Commission, spearheading a reparations-led TJ process, has been particularly inventive. See Marcelo Torelly and Paulo Abrão, ‘The Reparations Program as the Lynchpin of Transitional Justice in Brazil’, in Reátegui, Transitional Justice, pp. 443–85; and ‘Resistance to Change’, in Francesca Lessa and Leigh Payne (eds.), Amnesty in the Age of Human Rights Accountability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 152–81.

³⁵ Including non-attributed and non-state violence.

³⁶ Law 19.123, 8 Feb. 1992. Other measures instituted around the same time, including access to the public health system, were extended to various categories of victim and survivor including Rettig families.

³⁷ ‘El pasado vivo de Chile’, pp. 3–6.

³⁸ Verdugo, Patricia (ed.), De la tortura no se habla (Santiago: Catalonia, 2004)Google Scholar. Meneses was suspended then reinstated, amidst lawsuits for defamation during which the accuser, himself a torture survivor, was vindicated.

³⁹ ‘El pasado vivo de Chile’, p. 6, my translation.

⁴⁰ Author interview with Dr Paz Rojas, Santiago, Jan. 2013.

⁴¹ Zalaquett, ‘No hay mañana sin ayer’, pp. 313–33.

⁴² Ibid. , pp. 45, 64.

⁴³ See details and tables in Collins, ‘Human Rights Policy under the Concertación’, pp. 145–8.

⁴⁴ Initially to be set at 30 years, the term was extended to 50 years in the final text of the law. Then-president Ricardo Lagos generally offers a personalist, victim-focused explanation for this extension, stating that it proceeded from meeting a survivor keen to impress upon him her fervent desire to be sure that her children and grandchildren could not see her testimony within her lifetime. Advisers close to his office at the time also cite the precedent set by Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whom Lagos admired: in 2002, Cardoso bowed to armed forces pressure and signed off on an upward extension, to 50 years, of secrecy on official documents.

⁴⁵ Law 19.992, 24 Dec. 2004.

⁴⁶ For people sacked from their jobs for political reasons during the dictatorship.

⁴⁷ Legal proceedings for fraud were in fact instigated against a few dozen unsuccessful Valech applicants, and some prior applicants to the exonerados programme. See Observatorio DDHH, ‘Verdad, justicia y memorialización por crímenes del pasado’, Informe Anual sobre DDHH (Santiago: UDP 2012) and ‘Verdad, justicia y memoria a 40 años del golpe de estado’, Informe Anual sobre DDHH (Santiago; UDP, 2013). The 2013 report is also available in translation.

⁴⁸ At that time the ministry, like all official bodies including Valech II itself, was operating under a right-wing administration (sworn in in 2010). Many survivors were instinctively suspicious of intervention by a right-wing government in this issue area. PRAIS programmes were however allowed to continue operating according to their own, ad hoc, earlier criteria of admission, without further explicit discussion.

⁴⁹ Zalaquett, ‘No hay mañana sin ayer’, pp. 313–33.

⁵⁰ Informe, Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (2004), pp. 21–2, author's translation.

⁵¹ Ibid. , p. 19, author's translation.

⁵² Ibid. , p. 9.

⁵³ Informe, p. 8.

⁵⁴ Under the programmes of reparations for exonerados, and for retornados (returnees), respectively.

⁵⁵ After the year 2000, survivors bringing legal claims began to be routinely referred for forensic medical examination by judges at a loss as to how to investigate allegations of historic torture. The search for physical manifestations, or at the very least clear-cut signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), became a spurious method for differentiating between group claimants. The absence of a definitive diagnosis of PTSD was erroneously treated by some judges as a direct refutation of the veracity of survivors’ accounts. Interview with Dr Paz Rojas, Jan. 2013, and remarks by claimants and forensic service personnel at a closed seminar convened by the Observatory in 2013.

⁵⁶ The 2011 iteration, moreover, was not authorised to produce a ‘report’ but solely a statistical account and list of names.

⁵⁷ A point cogently made by Claudio Herrera, who served as the Commission's executive secretary, commenting in a personal capacity. See Observatorio DDHH, ‘Taller Comisión Valech II’.

⁵⁸ Behind the scenes anti-accountability pressures from the political right and present-day armed forces are routinely denied, but just as routinely evident, in day-to-day monitoring of TJ related events. See Observatorio de Justicia Transicional electronic news bulletins 1–35, since 2009. Numerous author interviews with judicial and police sources over the same period, on file with the author, support the point.

⁵⁹ Dictamen no. 60303, Contraloría General de la República, 1 Oct. 2012.

⁶⁰ Report to the UN Human Rights Council of the UN Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review – Chile (UN Doc. A/HRC/26/5, 2 April 2014), para. 121.116.

⁶¹ Criticism in 2013 of the lack of reference to human rights policy in any major presidential candidate's platform prompted the Bachelet campaign to release a ‘civil society consult’ document which mentioned ‘looking into’ the 50-year confidentiality of ‘judicial records’. The formulation contained no firm promise of action nor even any dependable reference to Valech, since its documents are certainly not classifiable as ‘judicial records’. See Observatorio DDHH ‘Truth, Justice and Memory’, 2013.

⁶² INDH Ord. 506, 19 Nov. 2013, and, in reply, Contraloría General de la República, Dictamen 41.230, 10 June 2014.

⁶³ The statute for Valech I was passed by a qualified majority, whereas Valech II was constituted by a decree law. This distinction was sufficient to allow Contraloría and the INDH to determine that access to information laws allowed an exception to privacy in regard to the latter but not the former.

⁶⁴ Timothy Garton Ash, cited in Arthur, Paige, ‘How Transitions Shaped Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (2009), p. 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ The pensions accruing to one and to the other situation were and are widely different, consisting of approximately US$ 666 per month for Rettig families, and US$ 217 for individuals named by Valech. The discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that the larger, Rettig, amount was designed to compensate an entire family for the loss of a breadwinner, while the Valech pension is personal.

⁶⁶ The bonus, of around US$ 1,500, was effected in late October 2015. The Subsecretariat was created on paper in mid-December, meaning it will not become operational until well into 2016.

⁶⁷ Written reports and proposals by the Programa de Derechos Humanos del Ministerio del Interior, on file with the author, and interviews with Programa personnel in 2014 and 2015, individual identities reserved at interviewees’ request.

⁶⁸ Thus social work services, memorial funds and legal advice to relatives (only) remain with the programme; victim lists stay definitively closed to new applications, and reparations are paid automatically by the state benefits agency. No state office currently has oversight, responsibility or powers over either victim lists or the content of reparations, and survivors have no entitlement to legal or social work support equivalent to that given to relatives.

⁶⁹ ‘Belated’ in regard to the ‘timely’ justice horizons required by the American Convention on Human Rights; and also when compared to much earlier official action over deaths and disappearances.

⁷⁰ Notification was via a now-defunct website. The socio-economic, geographical and age profile of applicants made this perhaps the single least appropriate method that could have been chosen, even considering Chile's relatively high levels of urbanisation and connectivity.

⁷¹ Online legislative archives contain copies of some relevant legislation. The INDH offers web access to the 2011 list, and advice on entitlements. No governmental site however hosts the 2004–05 and 2011 reports and lists in their entirety.

⁷² Around 80 per cent, at a conservative estimate based on Observatorio records at mid-2015.

⁷³ Through, respectively, ex officio investigative orders made by a judicial prosecutor in 2011 and criminal complaints (querellas) made by the Human Rights Programme in its own right after 2009.

⁷⁴ A Supreme Court pronouncement in 2010 supported the contention of one specially-designated ‘human rights case’ magistrate that torture or sexual assault should be investigated as ordinary crimes. Vigorously contested, the disposition has been partly reversed. See Observatorio DDHH, 2012.

⁷⁵ See TJ-themed chapters of annual human rights reports for 2014 and 2015 by the UDP and the National Human Rights Institute, INDH available at www.indh.cl.

⁷⁶ Notably, and quite anachronistically, Valech pensions and bonuses are inheritable only by widows (not by widowers) upon decease of the recipient.

⁷⁷ When educational scholarships offered as part of Valech entitlements were made transferable to children and grandchildren.

⁷⁸ Correa, Reparation Programs for Mass Violations of Human Rights.

⁷⁹ Limited exceptions have begun to emerge only through the actions of a small number of individual judges, who have begun to open separate investigations if witnesses called in disappearance cases testify that they themselves were tortured. This route is one source of the occasional judicial requests for Valech II case files that are currently being honoured.

⁸⁰ Sources: written reports and proposals by the Programa de Derechos Humanos del Ministerio del Interior, on file with the author, and interviews with Programa personnel in 2014 and 2015, identities reserved at interviewees’ request. See also Observatorio DDHH, 2014.

⁸¹ See Inter-American Court on Human Rights, El Mozote v. El Salvador (2012).

⁸² See controversies in Peru over the Ojo que Llora monument, and the subsequent threat by Peru to withdraw from the Inter-American system ( Hite, Katherine. Politics and the Art of Commemoration (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar). For El Salvador, civil society completion of a truth commission-mandated victim memorial provoked a right-wing municipality to erect a statue to death squad founder Roberto d'Aubuisson.

⁸³ As cited in Pérotin, ‘El pasado vivo de Chile’, p. 2.

⁸⁴ See Bissett, Alison, Truth Commissions and Criminal Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ Zalaquett, ‘No hay mañana sin ayer’, p. 61, my translation. See, for a general discussion, Waterhouse, C., ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Moral Agency and the Role of Victims in Reparations Programs’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 31: 1 (2009), pp. 257–94Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ See Observatorio DDHH report on Valech methods. Based also on the author's experience of offering workshops on Valech II outcomes, to Santiago-based survivors’ groups and to a national association of former child detainees, in 2012.