Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? ed. Audrey R. Chapman and Hugo van der Merwe; Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Claire Moon

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)is by far the most noted and praised truth commission in theworld. It has served as a role model to many of the subsequenttruth commissions set up worldwide, as well as inspired a vastbulk of scholarly literature. For those interested in the truthand reconciliation process in South Africa, or in truth commissionsin general, two read-worthy books have appeared on the marketthat offer a much-needed sobering account of the TRC. The edited volume by Audrey Chapman and Hugo van der Merwe isto my knowledge the most comprehensive and penetrating analysisof the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Theauthors argue that it is time to assess critically the TRC process,as well     

Truth commissions,trials-or nothing? Policy options in democratic transitions

Gross human rights violations have constituted a hotly contested national issue in many recent transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. This article analyses how newly elected democratic governments have dealt with violations committed by officials of previous authoritarian regimes. Empirical evidence from around 30 (mainly) Latin American and African countries undergoing democratic transition after the mid-1970s shows that the government's choice of human rights policy largely depends on the relative strength of the public's demand for truth and justice and the outgoing regime's demand for amnesty and impunity. Policy choice will tend towards trials as the outgoing regime becomes weaker and away from trials as the outgoing regime becomes stronger. Truth commissions are the most likely outcome when the relative strength of the conflicting demands is roughly equal. Where human rights policy deviates from predictions, the government always does less than expected. These arguments hold true both at the time of regime change and during the consolidation phase, as power dynamics often change over time.     

Introduction: the accountability function of the courts in new democracies

Much of the literature on ‘democratic consolidation’ has adopted a forward‐looking, future‐oriented perspective. Rather than studying past regimes, it tries to assess the life expectancies of contemporary ’third wave’ democracies. The article contends that authors have usually been unaware of the methodological complexities this choice of time perspective involves. If we want to reach reasonable judgements about the chances of democratic survival in a given country we have to be conscious of the probabilistic nature of such a prospective exercise. And we have to make (and justify) some basic analytical decisions. We have to explain the time horizons we are adopting as well as the future conditions we are assuming. We have to make clear how we construct the binary opposition between ‘consolidated’ and ‘non‐consolidated’ democracies. We have to decide whose expectations of democratic stability we take into account. And we have to cope with conflicting and unstable perceptions. Unless we ‘consolidologists’ heed these methodological ground rules, it is unlikely that we will ever reach shared judgements, or else, intelligible disagreements, about empirical states of democratic consolidation.     

Legal development and human rights in Uruguay: 1985–2002

This article attempts to explain why Uruguayan judges have lagged behind judges in Chile and Argentina in the prosecution of the military for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship period in the 1970s and 1980s. By tracing judicial human rights activity in Uruguay from the transition to democratic rule in 1985 until the end of 2002, I argue that Uruguayan judges have been actively restricted by an aggressive anti-human rights policy expressed through a national amnesty law and explicit executive interference in judicial matters. Structural changes to the judiciary might have aided Uruguayan judges to overcome these barriers. Instead, failure to reform the judiciary has prolonged its conservative nature and made judges slow in responding to international legal development in the human rights field.