ABSTRACT
This story was related to me by the director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, José Miguel Vivanco, to illustrate the concern among rights advocates that official truth-seeking is sometimes used as a means to avoid trials for rights abusers. In the end, the mandate for the commission in Guatemala explicitly prohibited it from having any “judicial aim or effect,” though it was unclear exactly what was intended by this language.1 (Would it, by the most narrow interpretation, restrict the later use of the commission’s information by prosecutors, for example? That was not at first clear.) Other commissions have also raised this concern. In El Salvador, the release of the truth commission report was answered with the immediate passage of a sweeping amnesty law. In South Africa, justice was put up for trade: the truth commission offered freedom from prosecution in exchange for the full truth about politically motivated crimes. These cases and others have led to a suspicion that truth commissions are likely to weaken the prospects for proper justice in the courts, or even that commissions are sometimes intentionally employed as a way to avoid holding perpetrators responsible for their crimes.
