LAUSR

Recent thinking and practice in transitional justice suggest that victims and societies hold indivisible, perhaps even simultaneous, rights to truth, justice and reparations after gross human rights violations. This paper analyses the advantages and drawbacks of such holistic approaches to transitional justice, through a case study of Chile’s second official truth commission, the ‘Valech Commission’. The paper illustrates the politics of ongoing contestation about authoritarian era crimes in Latin America, showing how and why the commission was designed to deliver on certain truth and reparations obligations toward survivors of past state repression, while attempting to explicitly decouple truth revelations from judicial consequences. It also discusses the implications of associating truthtelling and reparations in a single instance, and in doing so contributes to debate about the potentially contradictory or counterproductive outcomes that may arise from the yoking together of truth, justice and reparations functions in transitional justice policy design.