Mobilization and Judicial Recognition of the Right to the Truth: The Inter-American Human Rights System and Brazil

Abstract

The right to the truth regarding gross human rights violations was an achievement of a transnational mobilization carried out in reaction to the violations committed by dictatorships and parties involved in armed conflicts in Latin America between the 1960s and the 1990s. This chapter shows how the judicial consecration of this right took place in individual legal actions, focusing on the Inter-American System for the Protection of Human Rights and the Brazilian case. We analyze the understandings developed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in cases initiated by civil society against Latin American States. We then examine, in the Brazilian experience, how courts also recognized the existence of a right to the truth, in civil actions filed as a strategy firstly to resist human rights violations and then to challenge the limits of transitional justice in Brazil. On a “case-by-case” basis, the Brazilian judiciary accepted some of the meanings ascribed to the right to the truth by the Inter-American System and rejected others.