Clara Sandoval

Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict: Impulses from the Max Planck Trialogues

The international law on reparation for victims of armed conflict is complex. Numerous subfields of international law are involved, among them international human rights law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and the law on State responsibility. In addition to this complexity, reparation-related questions are often highly politically charged. They are focal points of contestation about moral values, different conceptions of justice, and approaches to international law, including the status of the individual human being in this order. Against this backdrop, the collection of short essays explores whether and under which circumstances individuals have a right to reparation under international law. The introduction unpacks the legal dimensions and identifies the currently most controversial issues. One set of essays then analyses, from different angles, whether a right to reparation for individuals exists as a matter of law. Another set recounts experiences with the implementation of reparation mechanisms and discusses the challenges. A third group of essays addresses the role of domestic courts. The essays (‘impulses’) are one outcome of the Max Planck Trialogue workshop on reparation for victims of armed conflict, held in November 2017 in Berlin.

Two steps forward, one step back: Reflections on the jurisprudential turn of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on domestic reparation programmes

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to an area of research that remains neglected in both the literature on reparations under international law and on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: the coexistence of reparation regimes at the international and domestic level and the problems this creates. In particular, it reflects on the jurisprudential turn of the Inter-American Court in the area of reparations as a result of considering allegations regarding Domestic Reparations Programmes (DRPs) in states undergoing transitions, particularly Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Peru. In addition to considering the role of subsidiarity in the most recent jurisprudence of the court, it addresses three questions: Why has the Inter-American Court tried to reconcile the coexistence of these reparations systems? How has it done so? And, what are the consequences of this jurisprudential turn for international law and for the institutional design of the Inter-American System?