Measures to redress massive human rights violations

A study by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) analyses and contextualizes the concept of "transitional justice" in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System. All States have the obligation to guarantee human rights. To do this, they must have different mechanisms which allow them to carry out efficient investigations to find those responsible for massive human rights violations, conduct a fair trial with the corresponding guarantees and condemn criminal acts. The notion of "transitional justice", coined in 1990, refers to these legal mechanisms, originally designed to respond to the problems that arose when a government came to power after its predecessors had committed violations of these rights. This study, carried out by Florabel Quispe Remón, a researcher in the UC3M Department of Public International Law, analyses the origin and evolution of transitional justice, determining its characteristics, the historical and political context in which it developed and the role of this legal concept in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System. "Many of these crimes have not been investigated by the governments that succeeded others that had committed human rights violations. In many cases, amnesty laws have been adopted, leaving the direct and indirect victims unprotected," explains the researcher.