Chile Transitional Justice

932 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

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

Show More
Related

  • Rafael Trujullo: A Successful Leader Of Rafael Trujillo

    726 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the beginning, Rafael Trujillo was a fruitful and beneficial leader to the country of the Dominican Republic. Trujillo reduced foreign debt and made the country more profitable, mainly because he was an excellent business man. However with this new prosperity, came the loss of the citizen's political liberties (1 “Rafael Trujillo”). Rafael Trujillo may have made the country more profitable, but he still was getting away with taking away innocent citizen’s political liberties.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Chile's Road to Socialism

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first turning point in hope for the Chilean road to socialism was that of the election of Salvador Allende as president, which gave many Yarur workers the belief that a ‘workers government’ was on their side. “For the first time, a self-proclaimed ‘workers government’ ruled Chile, dominated by the Left and pledged to socialist revolution” (Winn, 53). Allende’s role as president gave identity to the Yarur workers that they were being represented and because of this, their struggles of working in the factory conditions set by Amador Yarur would come to an end. This identification with Allende as being represented by their own voice became the first stepping-stone to the demand for socialization of the factory. “The election of a ‘Popular Government’ was a signal for them to take the revolution into their own hands and fulfill their historic aspirations through direct action from below” (Winn, 140)....

    Read More

  • Chile and US Anti-Communism Affairs

    919 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the 1960s America, the pope of democratic faith, preached to the world about the evils of communism. When Marxist Salvador Allende lost by three percent in the Chilean election of 1958, the United States decided that the next election of 1964, could not be left in the hands of democracy. The United States began to work to stop Allende from becoming president. They went so far as to create projects to help train and organize so-called anti-communists among the peasants, laborers, students, and the media. Despite their efforts, in 1970 Salvador Allende was elected president through plurality. He became the first Marxist in the world to gain power in a free democratic election. Now you might ask, why would the United States be so interested in the politics of a third world country, furthermore the beliefs of one man. After all a person can only do so much, right?

    Read More

  • Chile’s revolution from below

    1292 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Peter Winn’s book, Weavers of revolution, the revolution from below collided with the revolution from above, producing unexpected yet catastrophic effect in Chile. Generally speaking, a revolution is a complete transformation of an established government or a political system and a radical change in people’s views and behaviors. However, a revolution from above refers to major political and social changes that are imposed by the government on the population. In contrast, a revolution from below is when the people of a nation rebel against the hierarchy to gain a revolution. In Chile, the revolution from above was initiated by Salvador Allende’s election in 1970, but it was mistaken as a signal to the workers “to take the revolution into their own hands and fulfill their historic aspirations through direct action from below” (140).

    Read More

  • Daniel Philpott's Six Practices Of Political Reconciliation?

    1382 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Graham, reconciliation is both “… a goal in the sense that it aims to restore relationships or to promote agonism or mutual tolerance, respect, and dignity […] [And] it is a process because it requires multiple modes, steps, stages, and transformations across all levels of society and amongst all stakeholders in a conflict” (Graham 2015). Through reconciliation and the related processes of restorative justice, parties to the dispute explore and overcome the pain brought on by the conflict and find ways to build trust and live cooperatively with each other. Restorative justice seeks to have a positive impact on offenders by confronting them with the consequences of their actions and delineating their responsibilities, giving them both the opportunity to repair the damage caused to the victim and to work on finding a solution to their problems (Umbreit, Bradshaw and Coates, 1999). According to Philpott, there are six components of political reconciliation: building socially just institutions and relations between states, acknowledgement, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness (Philpott

    Read More

  • Guatemala as Cold War History, by Richard H. Immerman

    1262 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Times favored the democratic concepts professed by the middle class. A wave of freedom of speech, press, and assembly engulfed much of Latin America and bathed the middle class with satisfaction. New political parties emerged to represent broader segments of the population. Democracy, always a fragile plant anywhere, seemed ready to blossom throughout Latin America. Nowhere was this change more amply illustrated than in Guatemala, where Jorge Ubico ruled as dictator from 1931 until 1944.

    Read More

  • Wrongful Convictions Essay Examples

    2174 Words  | 5 Pages

    This research paper will be used to acknowledge the trending factor in our criminal justice system of wrongful convictions. Wrongful convictions socially can be defined as convicting the innocent and punishing the not guilty. In other words, wrongful convictions play a huge part of our flawed Criminal Justice system. In order to fix and come up with a solution, we will have to first come to basis of first understanding the issue, then using this information to gain ideas to which we can apply to access better results to the issue of wrongful convictions. Once we come up with a reasonable solution to this problem then we can conclude that the data will show an eminent decrease in this trend. The causes of wrongful convictions include the “Snitch” Testimony, Eyewitness misidentification, false confessions and much more that I will add during the readings of this paper.

    Read More

  • Human Rights in Latin America and International Factors

    1040 Words  | 3 Pages

    Argentina and Chile experienced similar periods of extreme human rights violations. The response of the international human rights regime to the crimes against humanity, and the pressure placed on these count...

    Read More

  • The Dominican Republic, and its owner, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo

    1260 Words  | 3 Pages

    All throughout the 20th century we can observe the marked presence of totalitarian regimes and governments in Latin America. Countries like Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic all suffered under the merciless rule of dictators and military leaders. Yet the latter country, the Dominican Republic, experienced a unique variation of these popular dictatorships, one that in the eyes of the world of those times was great, but in the eyes of the Dominicans, was nothing short of deadly.

    Read More

  • Is Parole Ineffective of Effective in Curbing Recidivism?

    2253 Words  | 5 Pages

    All the laws, which concern with the administration of justice in cases where an individual has been accused of a crime, always begin with the initial investigation of the crime and end either with imposition of punishment or with the unconditional release of the person. Most of the time it is the duty of the members of constituted authorities to inflict the punishment. Thus it can be said that almost all of the punishments are an act of self-defense and an act of defending the community against different types of offences. According to Professor Hart “the ultimate justification of any punishment is not that it is deterrent but that it is the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime” (Hart P.65). Whenever the punishments are inflicted having rationale and humane factor in mind and not motivated by our punitive passions and pleasures then it can be justified otherwise it is nothing but a brutal act of terrorism. Prison System: It has often been argued that the criminals and convicted prisoners are being set free while the law-abiding citizens are starving. Some people are strongly opposed the present prison and parole system and said that prisoners are not given any chance for parole. Prisons must provide the following results: Keep dangerous criminals off the street Create a deterrent for creating a crime The deterrent for creating a crime can be justified in the following four types Retribution: according to this type, the goal of prison is to give people, who commit a crime, what they deserved Deterrence: in this type of justification, the goal of punishment is to prevent certain type of conduct Reform: reform type describes that crime is a disease and so the goal of punishment is to heal people Incapacitation: the...

    Read More

  • Balancing International Criminal Justice and Defendants' Rights

    2196 Words  | 5 Pages

    Through the analysis of fairness in international criminal procedure, the author gives an insightful account of the right to a fair trial and of its corollaries. This analysis is conducted looking at the law and practice of five international criminal tribunals, i.e. the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Court, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The author describes ‘fairness’ as a general category that includes a plurality of rights for the accused, and she indicates the relevant practice of international criminal tribunals in applying these rights. The overarching argument of the book is that fairness is a necessary element of international criminal trials and a paramount goal of international criminal justice. It must be guaranteed at the highest level, and a ‘just fair enough’ (p. 125) justice is not sufficient. In this regard, two main points are considered: (i) what ‘fairness’ in international criminal justice means and what its features are; and (ii) what standards of fairness are necessary for international criminal

    Read More

  • Offences against the administration of justice

    1916 Words  | 4 Pages

    After the I & II World War and pursuant to the precedent efforts for the execution of international justice in the shape of establishments such as the Nuremberg Tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) , there was a universal necessity to have a more comprehensive and transnational instrument for implementation of justice.

    Read More

  • The Purpose of Criminal Law

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    Laws serve several purposes in the criminal justice system. The main purpose of criminal law is to protect, serve, and limit human actions and to help guide human conduct. Also, laws provide penalties and punishment against those who are guilty of committing crimes against property or persons. In the modern world, there are three choices in dealing with criminals’ namely criminal punishment, private action and executive control. Although both private action and executive control are advantageous in terms of costs and speed, they present big dangers that discourage their use unless in exceptional situations. The second purpose of criminal law is to punish the offender. Punishing the offender is the most important purpose of criminal law since by doing so; it discourages him from committing crime again while making him or her pay for their crimes. Retribution does not mean inflicting physical punishment by incarceration only, but it also may include things like rehabilitation and financial retribution among other things. The last purpose of criminal law is to protect the community from criminals. Criminal law acts as the means through which the society protects itself from those who are harmful or dangerous to it. This is achieved through sentences meant to act as a way of deterring the offender from repeating the same crime in the future.

    Read More

  • The Impact of the Cold War on Developing Nations

    1172 Words  | 3 Pages

    Third world countries became the perfect battleground for cold war proxy battles during the early 1940’s to late 1990’s. United States wanted to flex its political muscle and try to curtail the spread of Soviet Communism in the developing nations. Most of the nations in developed world had already made their political and socio-economic stand regarding the form of governance and leadership pursued. Underdeveloped nations in Asia, Latin America and Africa were still vulnerable and easily influenced in terms of ideologies and political direction. Most nations in Latin America like Chile were recovering from colonialism and thus logistic, economic and political aid from powerful nations to propel their economies which made it easy for Americans and Russians to act as their “saviors’”. The quest for global dominance had intensified between United States and USSR and the shift was focused to developing nations like Chile. Both Americans and Russians used different mechanisms to enhance their propaganda and support the regimes which were friendly to them and used any means necessary to topple hostile regimes. CIA used covert operations in Chile and most of the Latin nations to plant their puppet leaders in order to safeguard their foreign policy interests and maintain dominance. Military coups and social unrests were planned, orchestrated and executed with the assistance of CIA. The research paper tries to critical analyze the impact of the cold war on Chile and influence of United States.

    Read More

  • Strengths And Weaknesses Of Transitional Justice

    973 Words  | 2 Pages

    There is little doubt that the process of transitional justice is a long and complex process of political, social and economic changes - especially considering the fact that it usually occurs in post-conflict societies and thus in nations that are still in a process of being shaped. Today’s theory on transitional justice emerged from historic tribunals, such as the Nurnberg trials after WWII, and truth and/or reconciliation commissions, for example the Gacaca courts after the Rwandan genocide or the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Even though some of these institutions pioneered some 70 years ago, very little research has been done on their operation modes and their actual outcomes - most studies tend to focus on how methods should operate in lieu of devoting their analysis to how they really operated.

    Read More

More about Chile Transitional Justice

Open Document