Human Rights, Transitional Justice and the Problem of Reconciliation

LUCAS MARTÍN

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27th IPSA World Congress of Political Science; 2023

International Political Science Association (IPSA)

The question I would like to address here today is what is the relationship between the three terms in the title: human rights, transitional justice and reconciliation. My reflection nourishes by the analysis of two contrasting experiences. The first is that of Argentina which has concentrated its response to its criminal legacy since 1985 on judicial prosecutions: indeed, trials have been and continue to be the main policy to this day, forty years after the end of the dictatorship. The second experience is the recent and still ongoing response that Colombia is giving to its criminal past and present through restorative justice that includes conditional amnesties, sentence reductions and alternative sanctions, that is, all forms of partial exoneration of International Human Law crimes that cannot be amnestied.