Law

he Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) put mental health on Peru's national agenda. Formed in 2001 to study the causes, consequences, and re- sponsibilities of Peru's 20-year internal armed confliet, the TRC called special attention to the devastating pychoso- cial damage caused by the war. These findings led to the TRC's recommended Integral Plan of Reparations (PIR), which ineluded

With each new transitional justice experience, the centrality and importance of providing reparations to victims becomes more evident. Reparations include both pecuniary payments and non-pecuniary goods and services to redress serious harms caused by political violence and conflict. They also signal the condemnation of the underlying crimes that caused such harm. Correspondingly, truth commissions typically recommend that governments institute reparations programs. Yet, when governments take up these recommendations, they face difficult implementation decisions. This reality is particularly true with regard to the distribution of individualized economic reparations as a response to widespread political violence, such as that caused by apartheid, armed conflict, repressive and authoritarian regimes, and other situations that leave a large universe of victims with diverse types of harms and suffering. Because of the extraordinary nature of such situations, governments generally opt fo...

This article explores how the Inter-American Court of Human Rights applies pecuniary and non-pecuniary reparations judgments in an effort to compel States to comply with the duty of prevention and non-repetition as embodied in Article 1 of the American Convention of Human Rights. Using Peru as a case study, the author argues that such judgments fail to induce States to guarantee internal domestic remedies, the mechanism used by citizens to check State compliance with the international duty to protect human rights, including the right to reparation, thus creating victim reliance on the Court for redress. In conclusion, the author proposes that the Court begin to use punitive measures in order to compel States to begin erecting internal remedies at home and thus strengthening domestic protection of human rights.

ABSTRACT∞ The power of memorialization is widely recognized as a form of symbolic reparation aimed at overcoming deep social divisions in the aftermath of mass violence. Yet memorialization as a juridical tool of repair lacks systematic conceptual elaboration, and its potential remains underutilized. This often results in ineffective, even detrimental monuments, and in programmatic failures to integrate memorial practices into multilayered strategies for justice and social reconciliation. This article explores three case studies from the Inter-American Human Rights System in order to examine the strengths and shortcomings of existing approaches to memorialization. We then offer recommendations for expanding the reparative and transformative capacities of symbolic reparations. We conclude by summarizing our observations on how the fundamentally expressive nature of symbolic reparations provides a potentially powerful tool of repair and transformation.