Selective Investigations

I really enjoyed reading Priscilla Hayner’s Unspeakable Truths. Her presentation of the methodological issues in individual truth commissions, as well as the relationship between the government and the truth commission in that country, was really thought-provoking. However, what I found the most interesting was her multi-chapter long discussion on the technical aspects of truth commission mandates that have far-reaching consequences, specifically identifying what the commission will actually investigate.

While each truth commission must set some guidelines on the specific types of human rights violations in will investigate, Hayner describes certain truth commissions whose mandates excluded obvious violations. In Argentina, the National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) only documented disappearances (kidnapping with no reappearance of a body). The presidential decree that established the commission did not sanction the investigation of murder by armed forces, temporary disappearances, forced exile, torture, or even disappearances prior to 1976. The limits placed upon the commission directly limited those victims of the previous government who could receive reparations. The people who were tortured and the families who had lost their primary providers would not receive any of the monetary aid given by the state. The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in Chile also placed considerable limitations on which violations the commission could not investigate. In Chile, those people who were forced into exile, illegally detained, and tortured, but not killed, were not listed as victims on the commission’s final report.

As Hayner describes in her book, there were obvious feelings of outrage that these limitations were placed on what “truths” the commissions in Argentina and Chile could cover. Obviously this seems, in my opinion, to be unjust. How can governments, specifically the presidents of these countries, specify what they will allow to be recognized as human rights violations, and simply disregard other incidents? The atrocities that the truth commissions in Argentina and Chile were not allowed to report upon are identified as human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 5 states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and in Article 9 it is stated that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.”

The Argentinean and Chilean truth commissions were not only prohibited from recognizing other atrocities in their final reports; they were also unable to identify all of the victims of human rights violations under the previous regime. What strikes me the most is that in both cases, people who were tortured were not listed as victims in the final reports. In class, we discussed torture as being the most dehumanizing thing a person can experience short of death. Perhaps this is why I find it so outrageous that neither commission was allowed to investigate acts of torture. Is it not unjust to allow some victims to hear the truth so that they can begin to heal, but deny others from even claiming the same status as victims, and therefore the same rights to truth and reconciliation?