Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) are established to research human-rights abuses that have taken place during a specific time period in a country or area or during a particular conflict. TRCs exist for a designated length of time, have a specific mandate, and varied organizational arrangements, processes, and procedures. These commissions allow victims, their relatives, and perpetrators to give evidence of human rights abuses and provide an official record of their accounts. Commission members have authority to access information from all institutions and to provide legal protection to witnesses. TRCs are most helpful when they are headed and created by strong leaders who have a peaceful vision for their country's future.

In most cases, one goal of truth and reconciliation commissions is to produce and disseminate a final report that includes both conclusions about the abuses that occurred and recommendations for preventing a recurrence of these abuses. Ultimately, the goals of such commissions are to contribute to ending and accounting for past abuses of authority, to promote national reconciliation, and to bolster a new political order or legitimize new policies.

More than twenty truth and reconciliation commissions have been established around the world since the first was created in Uganda in 1974. The majority of TRCs were established by the national governments of the countries in question, some by international organizations such as the United Nations, and a few by nongovernmental organizations. When national governments form commissions, those governments are usually transitional governments, because newly emerging democracies often want to or are sometimes forced to give a formal accounting of the violence, crimes, and civiland human rights abuses of the previous regimes.

Justice

Much has been written about truth and reconciliation commissions, but in all the literature no theme has been as prevalent as justice. TRCs are often seen as controversial because of the tension between the two extreme positions that can form between those who want to exact vengeance for horrible acts committed against innocents and those who feel the need to offer forgiveness for those horrific acts.

Many believe that the perpetrators of human rights abuses, violence, ethnic cleansing, or genocide must be subjected to criminal proceedings by a tribunal or a court of law that can establish the facts of the abuses, render verdicts, and, if needed, mete out punishment. This is often called retributive justice. But truth and reconciliation commissions are not designed to be courts of justice.

Truth and reconciliation commissions are designed to establish what is often called restorative justice. This approach to dealing with the past seeks reconciliation instead of retribution. Believers in restorative justice hold that when a perpetrator confesses his crimes, the victim is empowered through forgiving the tormenter. They believe that the healing can be even more pronounced if the TRC has the power to order and enforce reparations or restitution. The society at large can be helped by the public airing of crimes or grievances, which is sometimes accompanied by confessions. TRCs typically involve a greater degree of public participation than criminal trials do.

Because TRCs are not punitive, they can result in situations where, following the public airing of grievances, victims watch perpetrators continue to enjoy their freedom despite their acts of violence. One way to avoid this problem is for TRCs to serve as a first step to the prosecution of selected individuals who are deemed responsible for especially heinous crimes. A country may begin with one process and bring about closure with the other, or run both processes simultaneously, perhaps putting the leaders and planners of atrocities on trial while using a TRC mechanism for other players in the crimes or events being addressed.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution