Chile Transitional Justice

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Recommended: The concept of restorative justice

Case Study: Chile’s Transitional Justice
In 1990, the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established and became the primary strategy chosen by the state, to handle the systematic human right violations committed during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Chile is one of the earliest countries to establish truth and reconciliation commissions and continue the pursuit of justice for many of the disappearances and killings during this era; reparation programs have grown gradually and a second truth commission, the “Valech commission”, has been established. The Chilean TRCs are considered to have “set the standards” for such commissions and are an important source for revelation and information. In this paper, I argue the effectiveness …show more content…

Its foundation is a range of mechanism and processes that are characterized into two categories, retributive and restorative justices; to provide form reparation for the victims of human right abuses and to construct punishments for individuals or groups for the crimes that were committed during the process of transition. There are five “core principles” of transitional justice are; trials, truth commissions, reparations, lustrations and amnesties. These mechanisms are implemented to accomplish the state’s obligations to investigate, prosecute and punish individuals, to seek the truth, to aide victim with reparations and to reform abusive institutions. Within in the last decades, transitional justice as method has evolved essentially and it’s considered the principle to the processes of transition to democracy and peace and the answer to national conflict. Thus, political leaders seek the installation of these temporary mechanisms to challenge past violations and to help restore legitimate legal systems and democratic …show more content…

The Concertación de Partidos por el ‘NO’ gathered over sixteen parties and movements in attempt to gain the ‘NO’ vote and won 54% of the vote. Soon after the end of military junta, the first democratic elections were held in December 1989 with the Concertación de los Partidos por la Democracia as the winning party and Patricio Aylwin Azocar as the president. The Concertación campaign promoted to seek justice for the past human right violations, to provide reparations for the victims, persecute the military regime and revoke the amnesty law, to release political prisoners and reintegrate the exiled into the country again. Amidst the course of the plebiscite and establishing the newly elected government, the military issued a series of laws that secured its position of autonomy, both politically and financially, and established connections to the Supreme Court. The Aylwin government would soon faced political reality as they realized the series of authoritarian controls which were anointed in the 1980 Constitution, constraining Aylwin’s

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