“Which violence is serious, which victim is a victim?” Truth Commissions and their relationship to the Human rights paradigm

Abstract

The article takes as a starting point that the human rights language is built upon the intersection of at least three distinct modes of normative justification: the moral, the political and the legal ones. In face of such division, the article asks: how does the human right language contribute for the creation and assurance of rights to truth and memory? Two arguments will be developed. First, the state tends to reproduce the human rights’ global paradigm in its attempts to create transitional justice mechanism. The Truth Commissions are a prime example of such normative translation in local contexts. Second, the article argues that Truth Commissions shows at least two major constraints regarding its normative frame: on one hand, the definition of what human rights violations shall be recognized as such, on the other, the crucial decision of whose narratives shall contribute to the transitional process itself.