Lisa J. Laplante

Truth with Consequences: Justice and Reparations in Post-Truth Commission Peru

Truth commissions have become key mechanisms in transitional justice schemes in post conflict societies in order to assure transitions to peace, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. However, few studies examine what must happen to ensure that the transition process initiated by a truth commission successfully continues after the commission concludes its truth-gathering work and submits its final report. This article argues that while attention often focuses on prosecutions and institutional reforms, reparations also play a critical role. The authors share their observations of how government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society sectors and victim-survivors associations struggle over reparations in post truth commission Peru, offering a preliminary analysis of key theoretical suppositions about transitional justice: they explore whether the act of telling the truth to an official body is something that helps or hinders a victim-survivor in his or her own recovery process, and whether in giving testimonies victim-survivors place particular demands upon the state. The authors conclude that while testimony giving may possibly have temporary cathartic effects, it must be followed by concrete actions. Truth tellers make an implicit contract with their interlocutors to respond through acknowledgment and redress.

Commissioning Truth, Constructing Silences: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Other Truths of 'Terrorists'

The authors contest the popular view that Peru’s war on terrorism was successful through a military clampdown revealing how this approach foreclosed responding to demands for careful accounting. It also resulted in a legacy that continues to polarize and divide Peruvian society which makes open and honest dialogue on the past nearly impossible. While the government may have defeated two revolutionary movements, it reduced the political space to consider what motivated thousands of the Peru’s poorest citizens to accept violence as an acceptable means for change. In this article, the authors disaggregate the term “terrorist” to reveal the vast motivations, actions and intents of those who affiliated themselves with violent oppositions. Moreover, they explore the often ambiguous line between victims and perpetrators by sharing archival research which revealed how hundreds of Peruvians imprisoned for terrorism engaged with the Peruvian Truth Commission through an unpublicized letter writing campaign that portrayed themselves as victims. They content that historical clarification projects must be more than mere exercises in reviewing the past, but must lead to questioning and scrutinizing collective identities which often exclude certain voices that are nevertheless needed to be heard for longer term societal change. It is in these silences that the marginalized may suffer dis content that leads to new cycles of protest and maybe even violence.

The Domestication of International Criminal Law: A Proposal for Expanding the International Criminal Court’s Sphere of Influence

This Article addresses the question of how to evaluate the effectiveness of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Beyond focusing on the number of arrest warrants, indictments, and prosecutions credited to the Court since 2002, this Article proposes a broader criterion of asking whether the ICC helps to combat impunity and deter future human rights atrocities across the globe. While the ICC aims to end impunity for the most serious crimes, it is unrealistic that it would ever achieve this ambitious goal on its own, given limited resources and capacity to handle more than a handful of investigations and trials. Additionally, as a treaty-based international organization, the ICC enjoys limited jurisdiction over cases that occurred after the Rome Treaty entered into force in 2002 (and even then from the date that a state party ratifies the treaty). Thus, many of the world’s most serious offenders whose crimes occurred before this time will never be hailed to the ICC chambers, leaving prosecution entirely up to domestic courts. This Article examines this dynamic building on the theory of “proactive complementarity.” Normally scholars who propose this type of collaboration take as their starting point the temporal and geographic treaty restrictions imposed by the Rome Statute. This orientation leads to two notable consequences that undermine the overall effectiveness of the ICC in attaining its broader mission: First, the ICC will remain completely removed from many local efforts to harmonize national systems with international norms. At the same time, the ICC will also be removed from many important domestic criminal proceedings, although these trials involve serious offenders whose trials constitute important contributions to international jurisprudence that directly impacts the ICC’s own work to assure uniformity in prosecutions of international crimes. Secondly, this strict interpretation of the ICC’s mandate also means that it will miss the opportunity to offer the subtle type of international support that can often create a “moral suasion” that helps assure the momentum of transitional justice schemes. In response, I propose a widening of the concept of proactive complementarity to include engagement with States Parties, even if it regards matters that technically fall outside the jurisdiction ratione temporis found in the Rome Statute’s Article 11 and admissibility requirements of Article 17. I use the case study of Peru to show how the ICC could have exerted more influence on the criminal trial of former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) by lending political support as the government sought to harmonize the domestic criminal justice system to the standards of the Rome Statute and to assume a more active presence with regard to the historic human rights trials of Fujimori.