Reparation Policies Research Articles

Between Accountability and Reconciliation: The Making of “the Victim-Centered Approach” at the International Criminal Court

Abstract The International Criminal Court is the first international court to have incorporated the newly recognized right of victims to redress. However, there remains considerable skepticism about how the ICC and, more broadly, international criminal justice serve the purposes of victim redress. This article examines the development of the ICC’s reparations policy from the standpoint of how constitutive rules of international criminal justice have been changed. It illustrates how conflicting views regarding victim reparations have formed different preferences within the institution, even among the judiciary. Unlike existing studies that tend to regard the ICC as a monolithic law enforcement institution, this article demonstrates that the victim-centered approach to reparations at the ICC is a compromise between two models: an accountability model that tries to confine the scope of reparations within the clearly defined liability of the convicted person; and a reconciliation model that aims at reaching a large number of victims to facilitate the rehabilitation of the community. The finding has two implications. First, although the study reveals severe tensions between individual accountability and social reconciliation, the tensions can be reconciled through creative judgments. Second, related to the first implication, the ICC is not just a law enforcement institution, but also a policymaking institution, which has considerable leeway in designing reparations policy.

Reparation Policy in Gendered Political Violence: Gendered Torture During the Dictatorship and the Recent “Social Explosion” in Chile

This study explores the gendered violence dimension present in the torture exerted in Chile and the problems that continue to affect the reparation policies. The analysis covers the cases of political prisoners during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) and that of the people detained within the context of the social protest of October 18, 2019. The methodology used for this study includes desk research on secondary sources on gendered political violence and torture such as scholarly books, journalistic and academic articles, and non-governmental organization reports, analyzing their contents from a perspective based on human rights and gender. We argue that the crystallization of gender-based violence exerted by Chilean State agents is linked to the biases present in post-dictatorship reparation policy and reflect on the impact of these biases on the assurances of non-repetition of human rights violations.

Addressing Past Injustice, Empowering for the Future? Reparation Policies and ‘Victim’ or ‘Survivor’ Identities in Tolima, Colombia

ABSTRACT Colombia’s Victims and Land Restitution Law of 2011 (Law 1448) has established an ambitious reparation framework. Using primary data from six municipalities in Tolima, we highlight how the limited realisation of Law 1448’s transformative aspirations has contributed to a complex co-existence of ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ identities. We argue that this pattern reflects the ambiguities of a reparation framework that emphasises the transformation of victims into empowered agents but struggles to fulfil its promises due to insufficient resources. To fully understand pitfalls and opportunities of transformative justice, researchers need to pay closer attention to its impact on people’s everyday survival strategies.

Black Religion and Reparations: Pragmatic Trajectories and Widening Support

This article examines reparations advocacy by a vanguard of African American faith leader proponents, from Bishop Henry McNeil Turner’s late-19th century demands for federal payments toward emigrationism and Black Atlantic linkages, to 21st century Black clergy involvements in national level, local level, and sector-specific reparations policy activism. Attention is paid to evolving theoretical and operational framings of this reparations advocacy and to variances in levels of American religious and political receptivity to reparations proposals. The conclusion drawn from available evidence here is that reparations advocacy by Black religious leaders has proven more pragmatic than purist, as concerns increasingly have shifted toward maximizing public support and prospects for reparations deliverables.

Incommensurable worlds, irreparable wounds: Transitional justice politics and personal violent pasts in postconflict Peru

Reparation programmes in transitional justice processes imply that there are ways to repair social bonds, to dignify victims of violence, to reconstitute what is lost. But how does losing a relative translate into the twists and turns of a state social programme? Based on ethnographic research in the Peruvian Andes and the life history of a daughter of a Shining Path leader, this article explores the ways in which transitional justice discourses get translated into specific national reparation policies embedded in a series of mnemonic wars. These mnemonic wars imply different levels of confrontation, and invisibilization of subjects and citizenships.

Predicting Psychological Well-being in Survivors of Armed Conflict in Colombia

ABSTRACT The assessment and promotion of the psychological well-being in people and communities affected by the armed conflict are pending tasks for the Colombian health system. This study aimed to analyze the extent to which the dimensions of social support and quality of life significantly predict psychological well-being in survivors of the armed conflict in Colombia. For this purpose, a structural equation model describing the links between these variables was developed. A predictive cross-sectional design allowed confirming significant differences between a sample of 272 survivors (Mage = 43.24, SD = 14.25, range 18–85) and other 212 participants not affected by the armed conflict (Mage = 32.42, SD = 12.03, range 18–69). Using a Mann Whitney U test, the results revealed that both samples differed in all the dimensions of quality of life and social support, with the exception of the dimensions Environment and Instrumental. In survivors specifically, psychological well-being positively correlated with both quality of life (r = .40, p. <.01) and social support (r = .30, p. <.01). A binary logistic regression correctly classified 72.4% of the sample of survivors revealing that the model acceptably classifies this population according to their level of well-being. The structural equation model developed showed a good fit GFI y TLI ≥.93, RMSEA ≤.06, CFI e IFI ≥.95. In addition to contributing to the existing knowledge about psychological well-being in survivors, the findings provide guidelines that allow the improvement and reinforcement of public health actions and comprehensive reparation policies.

Controlling victims: forced exhumations in the Peruvian Andes

ABSTRACT Exhumations were considered part of the Peruvian State’s reparation policies to victims of the internal armed conflict. On the basis of an in-depth ethnography conducted in Andean peasant communities, this article analyses the forced nature of certain exhumations done in post-TRC Peru and the doubts cast on the testimonies of the surviving victims. This essay posits that the exhumed body has become a site for the production of “truth” in a context in which the recipients of economic reparations have the veracity of their testimonies questioned, and at times are deemed fraudulent. Through the analyse of the bureaucratic implementation of exhumations and of their effects on an intimate level, its demonstrates how State-controlled exhumation policies continue its historic requirement of Andean peasantry submission when any socio-economic aid is provided. This article highlights the paradoxes of reparation policies that produce a institutional violence forms of discrimination against the Andean peasantry.

Burocracias humanitarias en Colombia: conocimiento técnico y disputas políticas en la implementación de la Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras

Through an ethnographic study of the policy of reparation to victims in Colombia, this article examines the processes of the production of expert knowledge along different scales and disputes of humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia. These emerge from the institutional deployment of development and peacebuilding paradigms, at least since 1982, with the creation of the National Rehabilitation Plan (PNR), the Social Solidarity Network (RSS) in 1994, the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation in 2002, and the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS) in 2011. With the subjugation of some paramilitary groups in 2006 (Justice and Peace Law), the Victims and Land Restitution Law in 2011, and the peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas in 2016, transitional institutions associated with truth, justice, and reparation proliferated, and with them, specific bureaucracies and expertise. Thus, the article specifically examines the technical and political tensions between different professional and ideological configurations associated with the implementation of reparations policy and how these disputes are essential to understanding the moral and ideological dimensions of humanitarianism and development in Colombia. It also studies the role of cooperation agencies in inter-institutional strengthening as a specific dimension of the formation of the Colombian State. These articulations configure a moral economy of humanitarianism characterized by institutional experimentalism and the formulation of social projects, expectations, plans, and ideas that never reach the status of having been realized. This strips such policies of any transformative or emancipatory potential. Thus, from an ethnographic perspective, the article provides an account of the techno-political tensions of humanitarian bureaucracies at the middle scales of regional, national, and global institutional structures.

The Racial Wealth Gap and the Role of Firm Ownership

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that isolates the impact of the US racial wealth gap in 1962 on the long-run dynamics of wealth. The model predicts that one component of the initial gap, firm ownership, coupled with the intergenerational transfer of that ownership results in a permanent wealth gap independent of other dimensions of inequality. This implies that even if all discrimination against Black Americans had ceased upon the end of Jim Crow, the wealth gap would have persisted without a reparations policy addressing the fact that the initial firm ownership gap arose in the first place.

Justicia Transicional: ampliación de las leyes de reparación y el caso del insilio en la República Argentina

This article presents a chronological timeline focused on the reparation policies carried out in Argentina since the end of the last military dictatorship in 1983 to the present. It illustrates their origin, starting with some few sectorized acknowledgments by public sector institutions until becoming a diverse regulation able to cover several cases. Such reparation policies have extended the compensation time frame, and by means of judicial interpretation, even the margins of the law. Finally, in the context of the expansion of reparation policies in Argentina, it is necessary to ask whether internal exile should be considered as a case that needs to be regulated, taking into account the loss of rights and the damage inflicted on those who suffered it. For this purpose, a series of interviews with different victims were conducted.

Reparation policies in Colombia: Memory as a Repertoire

Colombia is one of the countries that has opted for a model of restorative justice to repair the victims of the armed conflict. To accomplish this, it has created a series of reparation laws which involve building scenarios to foster a call for remembrance (duty of memory) and in which the truth can be cleared up. The objective of this study is to provide a discourse analysis of how the notion of memory is constructed within the official reparation policies in Colombia. A discourse analysis of Law 975, Law 1408, and Law 1448 was carried out, using the logic of interpretive repertoires. As a result, it was possible to identify four repertoires: Institutional, Archival, Commemorative, and Reparative. The increasing globalization of reparation policies and the use of memory for the purpose of institutionalization that hinders the possibility of interpreting the past in another way, is discussed.

From Dignified Burial to ‘Terrorist Mausoleum’: Exhumations, Moral Panic and Mourning Policies in Peru

In this article, we examine mourning policies with respect to exhumations of mass graves from the Peruvian armed conflict. By reflecting on a case in which the exhumed dead, and their relatives, do not conform to the model of legitimate victims, we explore the limits of reparation policies and their effect on reconciliation. We investigate how the ‘terrorist mausoleum’ led to a significant episode of ‘moral panic’. We then analyse the normative perspective on mourning, as implemented in the public sphere, and how mourning, citizenship and nation are related when burying unwelcome dead associated with the figure of the ‘terrorist’.

German Reparation Debts After the Second World War—A Research Summary

Over the past five years, I have been grappling with the fallout from the predatory wars of annihilation waged by the Germans during the Second World War. The history of the Nazi dictatorship and of German-controlled Europe has been one of my most important research topics for decades. But the true extent of the enormous material destruction and humanitarian devastation caused by these wars has only now become apparent to me. Whoever addresses this issue from a contemporary perspective inevitably also comes across the related issue of reparations and compensation that arose from these wars and that still affects Europe today. At the same time, studying this topic involves entering a risky ‘No Go Area’ of historical research, because reparations discourse has certainly not been confined to history: the as-of-yet unpaid debts of the Second World War are grouped together like in a concave mirror. The research findings we have presented so far therefore only represent a beginning. In what follows, I will first present the results of my case studies of Poland and Greece, since they cover the historical framework of German occupation policy during World War II and the current conflicts over reparations. This will be followed by reflections on the economic-historical context of the Cold War and the failure of Allied reparations policy. Finally, I will critically engage with the latest arguments against a final settlement of the reparations problem and present in detail the ambivalence at the heart of the German culture of remembrance.

Patterned Payments: Explaining Victim Group Variation in West German Reparations Policy

Abstract∞ Why, once governments decide to pay reparations, do they fulfill their reparations promises to some groups and not to others? I argue that the organizational capacity of a victim group helps explain which groups receive reparations. I develop this argument through an in-depth case study of the postwar experience of German Sinti and Roma, supported by archival and interview data. I show that organized victim groups received reparations from the West German government in the 1950s, while Romani Germans, who did not organize until the late 1970s, were largely and deliberately excluded from receiving reparations payments until 1981, when the West German government created a reparations fund to benefit Romani German survivors. I show that this policy change cannot be understood without considering the efforts of Romani organizations.

Justiça de Transição no Brasil pós-ditadura civil-militar de 1964–1985: a importância das leis 9.140/1995 e 10.559/2002 para a implementação de políticas de reparação

&lt;p&gt;O tema da justiça de transição trata da busca por respostas a um passado de violações sistemáticas aos direitos humanos. Entre os mecanismos de justiça transicional comumente invocados, destacam-se: reparações, anistias, comissões de verdade, julgamentos, mudanças legais e institucionais. Com relação à experiência de justiça transicional posta em prática no Brasil a partir da sua mais recente democratização (1988), serão objeto de análise, no presente artigo, alguns aspectos das políticas de reparação, destacando-se a importância das leis 9.140/1995 e 10.559/2002.&lt;/p&gt;

Teoría de la justicia transicional y su vigencia en la reparación de niños, niñas y adolescentes víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar los componentes de la justicia transicional, desde la perspectiva del derecho a la reparación de los niños, niñas y adolescentes víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia. Este análisis se efectúa a través del estudio teórico de la justicia transicional, los estándares internacionales de reparación, el marco legal colombiano y las políticas públicas de reparación con enfoque diferencial para el caso de niños, niñas y adolescentes. Concluyendo, como la indemnización, la reparación judicial y simbólica no generan una efectiva e integral reparación para las víctimas de este grupo.

Las víctimas del terrorismo en España e Irlanda del Norte: dinámicas de selección durante los «años de plomo» y políticas de reparación

ETA y el IRA, las dos organizaciones terroristas más antiguas de Europa, llegaron a las cotas más elevadas de su actividad armada durante los «años de plomo», entre 1968 y 1981. El presente artículo pretende, por un lado, aportar una radiografía de las víctimas y de los responsables de los crímenes de este período, analizando estudios previos y revisando documentación que arroja luz sobre las dinámicas de selección de las víctimas practicadas por ambos grupos, siguiendo el modelo teórico de de la Calle y Sánchez-Cuenca. Por otro lado, ahonda en la deficiente atención institucional a los damnificados y analiza las políticas de reparación, que en ambos casos llegaron con más de tres décadas de retraso. Por último, se abordan las principales reivindicaciones pendientes, entre las que destaca el elevado nivel de impunidad de los crímenes cometidos, lo que condena a las víctimas a una victimización secundaria.

‘Knocking on doors that never open’: examining discourses of rejected asylum seekers from Kosova

ABSTRACT To address the dearth of repatriation research coming out of Global South countries and question the adoption of repatriation as a sustainable solution to migration crisis, this qualitative study examined the repatriation experiences of rejected asylum seekers from Kosova. Grounded in postcolonial theories and through a Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with rejected asylum seekers, the study examined dominant discourses which shape the repatriation process in Kosova. Interview findings identify a major, overarching discourse which constructs an exclusive EU, one that is superior to Kosova and although desirable, an almost impossible destination for Kosovars to reach. These findings illustrate that the European Union-Kosova power imbalance and the pervasiveness of the EU as ‘exclusive’ discourse is crucial in shaping experiences of repatriation and the identities of Kosovar rejected asylum seekers. Moreover, this study adds to the body of existing repatriation literature and provides important implications for reparation policies as well as practice with return migrants.

Reparación a víctimas de violación de derechos humanos y crímenes de lesa humanidad en Ecuador

En mayo de 2007, el ex presidente Rafael Correa creó una Comisión de la Verdad para Ecuador (CVE) a la que encargó esclarecer los hechos de violencia política ocurridos en el país entre los años 1984-2007. En junio de 2010, con la entrega del informe final de la Comisión, el Estado ecuatoriano dio inicio a una serie de acciones con el fin de reconocer su responsabilidad en los hechos y emprender medidas de reparación, judicialización y reformas administrativas. Este artículo busca un acercamiento a la forma en que el “hacer memoria” de los hechos investigados por la CVE se convierte en sustento para la definición y promulgación de políticas de reparación a víctimas y/o sus familiares, así como a la forma en que esas políticas encuentran recepción tanto en las autoridades llamadas a impulsarlas como en sus beneficiarios.

Chile, 40 Años de exigencias de verdad y justicia

Tras el regreso a la democracia en Chile, las políticas de justicia transicional iniciaron con la búsqueda de verdad, luego vinieron las políticas de reparación. Pero la justicia en Chile demoró en llegar: este proceso inició en 1998 con la interposición de la primera querella contra el exdictador Augusto Pinochet. En el año 2017 se cumplen 44 años del golpe militar, pero las consecuencias de las violaciones a los derechos humanos siguen estando vigentes. Cuatro décadas después, todavía se están investigando juicios de derechos humanos por el poder judicial. La Corte Suprema ha condenado a los principales responsables a penas de cárcel. En este trabajo se presenta el caso de Marcelo Concha, un joven militante comunista desaparecido en 1976. En 2016, sus familiares obtuvieron justicia al condenar la Corte Suprema a los responsables de este crimen, todos exagentes de la dictadura. Las políticas de verdad y justicia que se han realizado a 44 años de sucedidos los hechos son exigencia y requisito para una democracia consolidada que garantice un “nunca más” sobre esos hechos similares.