Cath Collins

Grounding Globalised Justice – International Networks and Domestic Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador

The UK detention of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 was hailed at the time as an unprecedented demonstration of the possible efficacy of ‘global civil society’ networks in holding former heads of state to account for crimes against humanity. This article nonetheless questions the concept, as well as the practical efficacy, of globalised civil society action or ‘human rights lawyering’ as an attempted response to past human rights violations. Based on extensive field research, the article argues that domestic factors, including domestic actor pressure and national judicial change, have proved more significant than international law or international activism in recent re-irruptions of the human rights accountability issue in Latin America’s Southern Cone. The case of El Salvador, meanwhile, shows that transnational initiatives, while occasionally successful in their own right, have not been able to interrupt or foreshorten domestic post-transitional trajectories to the extent of independently creating favourable accountability conditions.

Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21st-Century Chile

This article analyses the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973—90). We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration, and we identify those whose struggles to reclaim sites and spaces associated with past human rights violations represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. We also examine shifts in official stances and action regarding human rights and political commemoration.

State Terror and the Law The (Re)judicialization of Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador

The “re-irruption” in the mid- to late 1990s of attempted prosecutions for past human rights crimes in Chile, Argentina, and other parts of Latin America suggests both that the social legacies of massive human rights violations can be long-lasting and that transitional settlements featuring truth-telling and amnesty are not, as was previously thought, definitive. The transitional justice school of thought, which grew out of Latin American experiences of transition in the 1980s, underestimated the extent to which questions of criminal and civil responsibility for state crimes of torture, disappearance, and genocide would persist and eventually resurface in postconflict societies. Extensive field research into accountability trajectories in post-transitional Chile and El Salvador suggests that civil society protagonism through the courts has proved determinant in shaping the medium- and long-term future of the human rights question after political transition. The domestic mix of actor demands, judicial culture, and political-institutional constraints seems to be key in explaining why some countries have experienced successful and largely peaceful reopening of the human rights question while others have not.

Human Rights Defense in and through the Courts in (Post) Pinochet Chile

This essay discusses the origins, implications and future of present-day trials for past atrocities in Chile. It disputes the common misconception n that justice for past crimes in Chile began with the 1998 UK arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and ended with the latter’s death in 2006. In fact, such efforts began in October 1973 and continue through to the present. The resulting investigations, given a major new impulse in and since the 1998 ‘Pinochet case’, have had important effects on how the regime and its crimes are remembered and resignified. They are both artefacts and arenas of memory, history, and politics. They have had significant practical effects on how international law is received and operationalized in Chile, and on the operation of the judicial branch and subsidiary organs including the forensic service and detective police. In so doing, they potentially affect the protection and promotion of forward-looking rights guarantees.

Truth-Justice-Reparations Interaction Effects in Transitional Justice Practice: The Case of the ‘Valech Commission’ in Chile

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.