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Since its return to democracy, Argentina has made great efforts to address the legacy of the last military dictatorship. This paper presents a complete overview of the Argentinean policy of economic reparations for the victims of human rights violations committed between 1975-1983, including the beneficiaries, the crimes for which victims received reparations, the amounts paid, and the forms of payment. It analyzes the motivations for redressing the victims, from both national and international perspectives. It identifies the positions adopted by the different actors involved in the measures, especially the State and human rights organizations. The latter gained undeniable legitimacy by representing the victims and has consolidated into a group that has become the main actor on issues related to the legacy of the military dictatorship. The paper also focuses on economic, legal, and political questions that have arisen during the process of designing and implementing the reparation policy.

This paper describes the reparations programs implemented in Chile from 1990 to 2004. These programs target the victims of human rights violations committed during the military regime (1973-1990). These include the relatives of the missing and executed persons; people who were dismissed from their jobs for political motives; peasants who participated in land reform and were expelled from the land for political reasons; and Chilean exiles returning to the country. Political prisoners and torture victims were considered only in 2003. The creation of the Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture (2003-2005) was followed by a law which provides pensions to political prisoners and torture victims identified by the Commission. Created with different kinds of victims in mind, these programs were based on pensions, social services, educational benefits, and public recognition of the violations of the victims’ rights, monuments, sites of memory, and health assistance, mainly in the form of mental health services. The Program for Reparation and Integral Health Assistance for Victims of Human Rights Violations, created in 1991 and reinforced by a law at the end of 2004, has been the reparation measure for all kinds of victims of human rights violations, including third-generation relatives.

This paper evaluates the federal reparations program for fatal victims of political violence in Brazil. The Brazilian reparations program was born of an amnesty movement for political prisoners, followed by the discovery of mass graves exposing atrocities of the State. In response to pressure from civil society groups and the media, President Cardoso signed the 1995 Law of Victims of Political Assassination and Disappearance. The paper explores the limitations of the law, its exclusion of many victims of political violence, and the charge that the law transferred the burden of proof to victims’ families. It examines the Commission’s structure and operation, as well as the voting patterns of its members. It provides data concerning the cost of the entire reparations process, and sheds light on the surprising truth-telling function the Commission acquired in a country in which official truth-telling about the years of the dictatorship has yet to take place.

Truth commissions were created to investigate human rights violations as a result of political negotiations in both El Salvador and Haiti. The commissions included in their reports recommendations designed to secure reparations for the victims. However, despite the gravity of the events and the formal commitment of the governments, neither El Salvador nor Haiti has implemented these recommendations. Two case studies provide an opportunity to examine the economic, social, and political factors that explain non-compliance with truth-commission recommendations on reparations. This paper examines the experiences of El Salvador and Haiti, and presents some conclusions and lessons learned. The first and most important conclusion is that in order to ensure that reparations programs will be put into practice, a correlation of political forces that favors such programs is necessary. The construction of such a correlation depends on the existence of sufficiently powerful and influential players to promote and defend it.

This paper explores the reparations debate in post-apartheid South Africa and outlines the recommendations for reparations made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Although reparations were discussed at the multi-party negotiations at the end of apartheid, the new democratic constitution that came out of those negotiations did not provide for reparations. The legislation that created the TRC, however, established a special committee (the Committee on Reparations and Rehabilitation or CRR) to formally examine the reparations issue and make policy recommendations to the President. The CRR made its recommendations — widely considered to be one of the world’s most ambitious and comprehensive reparations policies — in the TRC’s 1998 Report. However, the South African government did not respond to these recommendations, arguing that since the work of other committees within the TRC was not yet finished, it could not consider the CRR’s proposed policy. Victim groups and civil society disagreed, and an acrimonious conflict ensued over the perceived slow pace of government action on reparations. Victims also pursued lawsuits for reparations against multinational corporations that conducted business with the apartheid government. In 2003, the government finally enacted a reduced version of the CRR’s original reparations policy.

Malawi’s five methods of paying reparations — court awards, the government’s Disaster Preparedness, Relief and Rehabilitation program, civil service grants, special payments to the political elite, and the National Compensation Tribunal (NCT) — have not brought public closure to past rights abuses and the antipathy they engendered. NCT procedures, which included neither public truth-telling nor the identification of perpetrators, have not fostered democratic consolidation. Growing out of a political compromise during the transition, the NCT has received nearly 20,000 claims and paid interim awards to less than one-third. Eligible are Malawians of any age who, between July 6, 1964 and May 17, 1994, were born in detention or exile, were subjected to wrongful imprisonment, forced exile, personal injury, lost property or business, lost educational opportunities, and/or employment benefits. An autonomous body within the judiciary, the NCT has been consistently underfunded and has limited the bulk of its payments to symbolic “condolences”. While the public is generally ignorant of the NCT, claimants are frustrated by its procedures, its “trivialization” of their pain and suffering, its “favouritism” as well as its failure to offer them full compensation, information about future payments, or a “sincere apology”. The existence of the NCT has allowed politicians to counter periodic public demands for a truth commission by asserting that the NCT is addressing the past and nothing more is needed.

How does a country repair its harm to a vulnerable minority targeted during times of national fear because of race? How did the United States redress its then popular yet unconstitutional WWII incarceration of 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans in desolate barbed wire prisons without charges, hearings, or bona fide evidence of military necessity? In response to a Congressional inquiry, political lobbying, and lawsuits, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 directed the President to apologize and authorized over one billion dollars in reparations. Congress also created a fund to educate the public about the government’s false assertion of “national security” to restrict civil liberties. Some considered redress a tremendous victory — rewriting history and personal healing. Others questioned reparations for one U.S. group but not others. Japanese American Redress served as a catalyst for reparations movements worldwide. This paper examines its genesis, legal implementation, and apparent effects. It also explores wide-ranging political mobilization and social meanings of redress and “unfinished business”. Reparations cannot be measured by laws alone. Diverse communities must engage contested questions of history, justice, and belonging. Reparations claims face often unforeseen benefits and limitations. The paper concludes with these “lessons learned” to date.

The September 11th Victims Compensation Fund can only hesitatingly find its place within a comprehensive study of reparation programs. While the origin of the Fund lies in the political exigencies surrounding a perceived threat to the security of the United States, it more accurately reflects the desire by the U.S. Congress to ensure the viability of its nation’s air carriers. Unlike traditional reparations which are closely related to a process of social reintegration of the victim, fostering civic trust and social solidarity, the Fund was not established to bring justice to the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Also, unlike traditional reparations, the Fund did not seek to serve as a mechanism of corrective or distributive justice as a result of an authoritarian domestic regime or internal conflict. It was initially created out of fear that recourse to the U.S. courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry. Implicitly, however, such pragmatism reflected a desire by lawmakers that the government be seen as doing all it could to ease the pain of those who suffered so greatly on September 11, 2001. Initial motivations for the program aside, there is no question that the compensation scheme has since taken on a life of its own. Ultimately, the Fund’s contribution to any reparations case-study lies in its cautionary tale about the creation of elaborate administrative schemes that try to individualize recoveries as the mechanisms through which to compensate victims.

In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the UN Security Council determined that Iraq was liable under international law for any direct damage resulting from its unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) was established to process the claims against Iraq. Since 1991, the UNCC has received approximately 2.6 million claims, which it has subdivided in six categories, depending on the status of the claimant, the type of loss, and the amount claimed. For certain claims, the UNCC has established fixed compensation standards, rather than assessing the exact amount of the loss. Other innovative features include mass claims resolution techniques and methodologies such as data matching, grouping, and sampling. The reparation process was funded through oil exports under the oil-for-food program. A share of originally 30% and later 25% of the proceeds was reserved for compensation. The oil-for-food program was terminated after the new war in Iraq in 2003, and the share of oil revenues dedicated to reparation was lowered to 5%. As of June 2005, the UNCC has decided nearly all claims.

The post-world war II German-Israeli reparations program is the largest, most comprehensive reparations program ever implemented. Traditionally, reparations were supported by the vanquished and were designed to compensate the victor for the damages caused during the war. The Wiedergutmachung (literally “making the good again”) program as it is called in Germany, or Shilumim (the payments) as Israelis usually prefer to refer to it, innovates in many areas and goes beyond this interstate framework. Jewish leaders participated in the Luxembourg negotiations that led to the signature of the 1952 treaty, and community networks played a crucial role in the distribution of the money to the victims. Civil society groups played an instrumental role in the United States as plans for reparations were being discussed during the war. Neither the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) nor Israel existed during the war. Reparations have been paid to the state of Israel and were paid to Jewish Holocaust survivors regardless of their nationality. The FRG benefited politically and economically from this treaty. It was able to enter the international arena and establish diplomatic relations with Israel, whose economy greatly benefited from the money it received.

In 2001, 56 years after the cessation of hostilities in World War II, Germany’s federal government and a group of large German companies entered into a new reparations agreement aimed at compensating people who had been forced to work for the Third Reich against their will. This paper examines the confluence of historical circumstances that led to such a belated attempt at righting the injustice, and the political factors behind the extremely “rough” criteria that were used to allocate funds to claimants. It also examines the distribution effort itself — still not quite completed by mid-2005 — and finds that the various NGOs and governments involved in the reparations work were surprisingly successful in tracing claimants and making payments to them, given the amount of time that had elapsed.

This paper seeks to articulate a conception of justice in reparations for victims of human rights violations when the aim is to repair a large number of cases, as opposed to individual, isolated cases. It starts with an effort to establish some semantic clarity by trying to distinguish between two different contexts for the use of the term “reparations”. It discusses some of the problems with merely transplanting the ideal of compensation in proportion to harm from its natural home in the resolution of individual judicial cases, and using it as a standard of justice for massive reparations programs. Instead, it argues in favor of thinking about justice in the context of massive cases in terms of the achievement of three goals, namely, recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity — three goals that are intimately related to justice. Finally, it tries to shed light on the basic trade-offs that accompany some of the choices that have to be made in the process of constructing a comprehensive and coherent reparations program.

This paper assesses recent trends in international law regarding the availability and character of reparations. Presently, reparations issues have arisen particularly in domestic societies searching for transitional justice in the aftermath of authoritarian rule. These issues are shaped by national legal systems, but are also influenced by international practice. In these transitional settings, the search for justice is affected by political preoccupations such as the persistent influence of displaced prior authoritarian leadership as well as by real and alleged limitations on the financial capabilities of transitional states. No general approach can address the interplay between national and international law at this stage. Reliance must be placed on a case by case approach, considering matters of context such as the degree of suffering and disability inflicted on particular categories of claimants, the balance of claims versus the State’s demands for resources to fund sustainable and equitable development. Remoteness in time bears on the credibility of the claimants as present victims tend to be given priority over victims in the distant past when assessing relative merits. Scale and selectivity suggests that if the total of claims overwhelms the administrative capacity of the state, there will be a tendency to substitute apology and symbolic gestures for material ones, and award reparations based on individual need associated with the prior deprivation. International law informs background moral and political thinking about reparations, but practical considerations of capability and prudence are decisive in most instances, making the influence of international law indirect and sometimes marginal.

This paper examines how international law contributes to contemporary understandings of transitional justice with respect to reparations for victims of gross and systematic human rights abuses. The author surveys the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2003 to determine how the Court’s practice can be used to guide the formulation of reparatory policies during political transition. Recognizing that the direct application of Inter-American case law to situations of mass atrocity is not always viable in practice, the author analyzes regional human rights jurisprudence, particularly that relating to compensation, to determine what role the Court’s rules can and cannot play as a reference for policymakers and societies faced with the challenge of designing a reparations program. He concludes that while landmark Court decisions like Velásquez Rodríguez provide general normative guidance, there are significant obstacles to extending to the transitional justice context many of the measures, amounts, and formulas relied upon by the Court in awarding compensation. The fairness of compensation outside the courtroom cannot be determined with reference to predetermined rules, but depends on the factual context in which the measures are adopted including the number of victims involved. A better source of comparative inspiration is found in the Court’s growing practice of adopting non-monetary reparations measures to deal with moral harm.

Compensation for human rights abuse can be approached from two different perspectives. The first is through principles of tort law, under which the compensation of harm for human rights abuse is no different from the compensation of other, ordinary harm. The second is based on principles of administrative compensation, where victims are defined in standardized terms in a statute that provides a relatively fixed, tabulated amount of compensation for all, which is typically smaller than judicial compensation. This paper analyzes the circumstances that justify a shift from the torts to the administrative approach to compensation, and how the two approaches should relate to each other. It addresses the issue of whether victims should have a right to choose between them in the disposition of their cases and, if so, under what conditions. Finally, it compares judicial to administrative compensation in relation to the goals a compensation program must pursue, and argues that even in those cases where administrative compensation offers the best option, it is advisable to leave room for the use of judicial compensation as well.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the individual (micro) and the collective (macro) dimensions of reparations, highlighting the gaps and confluences between the two by focusing on symbolic reparations. It argues that massive reparations programs leave a disparity between the individual and the collective dimensions of reparations, i.e., between the needs of victims dealing with extreme trauma, and the social and political needs of a transitional society. Through reparations, the victim seeks some sort of reparation, i.e., a psychological state in which they feel adequate amends have been made. However, whether reparation at an individual level has taken place is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. The individual (psychological) and the collective (political) always stand in tension with one another when granting reparations. This dilemma is central to the reparations debate. It is argued that the gap between the micro and macro can be narrowed through a better understanding of the impact of extreme political trauma. Steps can be taken at the social and political level to potentially increase the impact of reparations on individuals as well as the context, process, and discourses surrounding their delivery.

This paper provides an overview of psychosocial and mental health theory and practice as it has emerged in contexts of war, post-war, and transitional situations. It identifies several models that have guided much of this work until now, critically examines their underlying assumptions, and posits a series of limitations inherent in the dominant paradigm of post-traumatic stress disorder, especially as applied in the aftermath of political violence. It argues that psychosocial work as part of reparations processes must be designed and enacted within specific historical, cultural, sociopolitical contexts, with singular individuals and their particular communities. This perspective permits more effective ways of responding to and working within the diversity of challenges facing societies seeking to reconstruct in the wake of war and other forms of organized political violence. An alternative framework for this work is proposed, which must be articulated and shaped in practice by individuals, families, and groups in their neighborhoods, communities, and societies. Exhumations and reburials, in two distinct contexts, are examined as sites for psychosocial work within reparation processes. The paper concludes by describing ongoing questions that challenge psychosocial workers hoping to contribute to reparations work.

Feminists continue to point out that democratic transitions continue to fail to do justice to the victims of gender-based violence despite notable advancements in international law. The gendered nature of sexual violence and its ongoing economic, social, and psychological impacts express and reinforce discriminatory public attitudes and gender inequality beyond moments of democratic transition. For this reason, sexual violence against women should figure as a special category under State-sponsored programs for reparation. However, different forms of gender bias can throw up normative and practical barriers that prevent women from accessing the benefits that reparations programs make available. Reparations programs, nevertheless, like many public policies for recovery and redress continue to be largely gender-blind. This paper explores the challenge of repairing sexual violence against women and how national reparations programs might provide short-term redress while contributing to the achievement of longer-term goals for gender justice.

One of the least studied aspects of programs of reparation, both in theory and in practice, is financing. This is odd given the fact that mobilizing resources, both domestic and foreign, is politically one of the most difficult tasks any society can undertake. This paper centers on the subject of financing reparation programs and attempts to answer the following questions: Which factors play a role in the process of mobilizing domestic and foreign resources to finance reparations? Is financing solely a technical-economic problem, or does it involve political, social, and cultural factors? Why do governments prefer financing social programs instead of programs of reparation? How do the proposals made by truth commissions regarding financing affect the viability of programs of reparation? Which factors explain the efficacy of financing models of reparation programs? In order to address these questions, the paper has been divided into three main sections. In the first, programs of reparation are analyzed from the perspective of political economy, which means that both economic and non-economic factors that influence the mobilization of domestic and foreign resources by a transitional society are taken into consideration. The second section focuses on international experiences in the area of financing programs of reparation, with the purpose of extracting some lessons. The third section presents the main conclusions of the study.