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Human Rights Quarterly | 2015

Overcoming Barriers to Justice in the Age of Human Rights Accountability

Leigh A. Payne; Francesca Lessa; Gabriel Pereira

Amnesty laws are viewed as a main barrier to justice for past human rights violations. Scholars and practitioners expected the age of human rights accountability to reduce the number or coverage of amnesty laws that block human rights trials. Based on analysis of an original database of amnesty laws and trials, this article questions that outcome. Few discernible patterns regarding amnesty laws and accountability emerge; human rights trials are nearly as likely in the absence of amnesty laws or where partial laws in compliance with international standards and noncompliant blanket amnesty laws exist. Most of the countries that have overcome the amnesty law barriers to justice are in Latin America. This article thus uses the region to identify a multidimensional approach to pathways to overcome impunity and promote justice for past human rights violations. It considers policy recommendations to strengthen four factors that have advanced accountability in the region: civil society demand, international pressure, judicial leadership, and the absence of veto players.


Archive | 2013

Transitional Justice in Uruguay (1985–2012)

Francesca Lessa

Unlike Argentina’s role as a global trendsetter in the TJ field, Uruguay’s TJ experience was instead characteristically Uruguayan, that is, it reflected several enduring features emblematic of this country such as negotiations, pacts, concern with stability and governability, and slow and conciliatory attitudes. These characterized both the transitional phase in the 1980s and TJ throughout the decades, generating an environment of complete impunity and top-down policies of silence for many years. Indeed, progress on truth and justice was blocked for a very long time by an impunity law, which prevented all investigations into and prosecutions of past atrocities; the first attempt at a truth commission only occurred 15 years after transition and the first criminal charges were successfully brought in 2002.


Archive | 2013

Reconciliation versus Justice

Francesca Lessa

The 1976–1983 regime left behind a country not only defeated militarily in the Falklands War, with hyperinflation and a shambolic economy, but also a more enduring and sinister legacy: thousands of disappeared individuals, whose ghostly silhouettes and vociferous mothers have been haunting Argentina for decades.


Archive | 2013

Pacification or Impunity

Francesca Lessa

Since transition in the mid-1980s, the Uruguayan political and social context has often been characterized by a tension between the will to remember and the endeavor to forget. Numerous governments tried to enforce collective amnesia upon society to anesthetize it from the pain suffered (Bergero and Reati 1997)—a sort of top-down imposition of official silence wishing to eliminate from memory the blame laid upon human rights violators and the justice desired by victims (Morana 1997).


Archive | 2013

Transitional Justice in Argentina (1983–2012)

Francesca Lessa

In the early 1980s, Argentina was one of the first South American countries to emerge from military rule. Kathryn Sikkink aptly defined Argentina’s human rights trajectory as one from “pariah state to global protagonist” (Sikkink 2008, 1), underscoring the remarkable progress from systematic disappearances during the 1970s to groundbreaking developments in accountability since the 1980s.


Archive | 2013

The Downward Spiral toward Dictatorship

Francesca Lessa

For decades, Uruguay enjoyed the reputation of being an “exceptional” country: this led to it being labeled the “Switzerland of Latin America” and the “Sweden of the South” (Gonzalez 1991, 3; Weinstein 1988, 23). These tags underscored Uruguay’s distinctive and outstanding experience with liberal and participatory democracy, which starkly contrasted with the turbulence and authoritarianism of neighboring countries (Sondrol 1992). The dictatorship installed in June 1973 fundamentally undermined this perception; by the late 1970s, Uruguay had earned a new title as the “torture chamber of Latin America,” owing to the brutality of its repression of human rights (Pearce 1980).


Archive | 2013

Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay

Francesca Lessa


Archive | 2012

Amnesty in the age of human rights accountability : comparative and international perspectives

Francesca Lessa; Leigh A. Payne


Archive | 2014

Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay. Against Impunity

Francesca Lessa; Palgrave Macmillan


Archive | 2011

The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone

Francesca Lessa; Vincent Druliolle

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