Right to Truth, Truth(s) through Rights: Mass Crimes Impunity and Transitional Justice
Right to Truth, Truth(s) through Rights: Mass Crimes Impunity and Transitional Justice
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Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF Grant)
Hosted by the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva
Right to Truth, Truth(s) through Rights:
Mass Crimes Impunity and Transitional Justice
The “fight against impunity” for mass crimes, which emerged as a result of the
ravages of the 20th century, aims primarily to promote peacemaking and
peacekeeping, security and democracy in the wake of extreme political violence.
In the framework of transitional justice, the right to truth constitutes the first
pillar of this “fight against impunity”. But what is the right to truth and how is it
implemented in contexts of persistent impunity?
The right to truth is increasingly claimed by victims or their families as a new right
against the state and is enshrined in UN law and international human rights law, yet it
remains underexplored per se in legal literature. When it is studied, it is never
specifically analysed in contexts of persistent impunity, which are the result of, for
example, the maintenance of amnesty laws, state denial, systematic practices for the
disappearance of bodies, or, simply, the death of those responsible. This research
project hence addresses the following question: if the right to truth constitutes the first
pillar of the “fight against impunity” and supposes a state obligation to investigate, what
meaning(s) and what function(s) does it have in contexts of a priori irreversible
impunity?
The working hypothesis is that in addition to its regulatory functions, the law has a
“cognitive function” that manifests through various forms. In different situations of
impunity, this function always aims to establish the facts and to acknowledge the
crimes and their victims. This gives rise to a new paradigm: the “fight against denial”
(denial, here, in the sense of non-recognition of reality) as a wider approach to the
“fight against impunity”. Our hypothesis calls for a critical analysis of the law as an
instrument for the production of truth in relation to three types of evidence: the
testimony, the archive and the dead body. These are three traces that every criminal
enterprise aims to destroy, erase or conceal, particularly when such enterprise is the
product of state action. Nevertheless, these traces—as history and science teach us—
never disappear or remain silent completely.
The project is built around these (testimonial, documentary and corporal) traces, which
play a decisive role in the materialization of the right to truth outside the scope of
criminal law. By questioning the reach of the right to truth in connection to these
remains, this interdisciplinary research offers a holistic approach that will renew the
understanding of justice in the face of extreme violence. In so doing, the project will
also reflect, more generally, on the relationship between law, history and science in
the handling of mass crimes. Beyond its scientific value, the research will produce an
important database, which will be useful, from a practical point of view, to a community
of political, legal and grassroots actors.
This research project, which started in March 2016 and will be developed over four
years under the supervision of Prof. Sévane Garibian, is entirely funded by the Swiss
National Science Foundation (SNF Project PP00P1_157406/1) and hosted by the Law
Faculty of the University of Geneva.