Assessing a Late Truth Commission: Challenges and Achievements of the Brazilian National Truth Commission (original) (raw)

The Outcomes of the Brazilian Truth Commission - Successes and Failures in a Lengthy Transitional Justice Process

The Brazilian Truth Commission: Local, National and Global Perspectives, 2019

The Brazilian National Truth Commission issued its report on December 2014 and concluded that the military dictatorship that governed the country from 1964 to 1985 was responsible for crimes against humanity. It also stated that gross human rights violations are still ongoing in Brazil due to the lack of an institutional reform of security forces. This paper describes the main content of the report, its findings and recommendations, and analyzes the difficulties faced by the Commission, the expectations it failed to fulfill, and the contributions it has brought to the long and erratic Brazilian transitional justice process.

National Truth Commission in Brazil

Opinión Jurídica, 2021

The article aims to problematize the issues of memory and Transitional Justice from the context of the establishment of the Brazilian National Truth Commission – (CNV, in Portuguese). The disputes about what to remember, how to remember, and what to forget (or not to forget) can become very complex in times of political polarization. By problematizing the Brazilian case between 2008 and 2014, we seek to highlight how the institution path of the CNV dealt with legislative and empirical obstacles around memory, history, forgetting, and resentment. Methodologically, the research used primary sources (legislative and judicial documents, reports, opinions) and secondary sources (specialized literature on the subject). Using the descriptive method, we present the Brazilian transitional context and the course of the CNV to demonstrate how the tension between resentment and the right to memory and the right to truth were organized by the Commission. While the outcome of the CNV Report is relevant, the accountability of human rights violators in Brazil is neutralized by the justice system. The promise of a public policy on memory remains in oblivion controlled by political elites.Keywords: National Truth Commission; human rights; transitional justice; memory; amnesty.

National Truth Commission in Brazil: the Thread of History and the Right to Memory and Truth

Opinión Jurídica

The article aims to problematize the issues of memory and Transitional Justice from the context of the establishment of the Brazilian National Truth Commission – (CNV, in Portuguese). The disputes about what to remember, how to remember, and what to forget (or not to forget) can become very complex in times of political polarization. By problematizing the Brazilian case between 2008 and 2014, we seek to highlight how the institution path of the CNV dealt with legislative and empirical obstacles around memory, history, forgetting, and resentment. Methodologically, the research used primary sources (legislative and judicial documents, reports, opinions) and secondary sources (specialized literature on the subject). Using the descriptive method, we present the Brazilian transitional context and the course of the CNV to demonstrate how the tension between resentment and the right to memory and the right to truth were organized by the Commission. While the outcome of the CNV Report is re...

The Brazilian National Truth Commission (2012-2014) as a State-Commissioned History Project

THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF STATE-SPONSORED HISTORY AFTER 1945 (Edited by Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters), 2018

This chapter seeks to challenge accepted concepts and assumptions about state-commissioned history by analyzing the Brazilian National Truth Commission (2012–2014). Rather than conceiving of such a project as an isolated and fully state-controlled top-down undertaking, it considers the impact of civil-society actors including the unprecedented development of dozens of parallel “local commissions.” It, moreover, proposes a nuanced understanding of the “state” as a manifold rather than monolithic institution, composed of officials with varying and competing political views. Although some state agents supported the truth commission, others refused to cooperate. The Brazilian National Truth Commission and its report—one example of state-commissioned history—resulted from a complex and dynamic process of negotiation that involved diverse state officials, local commissions, and civil society actors.

The Brazilian National Truth Commission in the Context of Latin America: Local, National, and Global Perspectives 15.10 to 17.10.2015 – Hannover (Germany)

International Symposium Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation In the early 1980s, a new policy instrument emerged in Latin America to address the hundreds of thousands of tortured, killed, or disappeared citizens of the Cold War period. Truth commissions – ‘temporary’ bodies ‘empowered by the state’ (Hayner 2002: 14) to produce an official report including recommendations – have meanwhile spread globally and catalysed a breadth of academic studies from a variety of disciplines. Still, conflicting interpretations of truth commissions coexist. While some scholars regard them as national institutions tasked with “national” purposes like “nation building” or “national reconciliation”, others regard them primarily as global tools with diverse functions such as to spread a specific political-economic model. Scholars also offer contrasting assessments concerning the complex local, national, and global entanglements associated with commissions. While recent studies have analysed the process of ‘transnationalisation’ (an increasing standardization), others have cautioned to pay more attention to local experiences of commissions. The proposed symposium seeks to re-evaluate these unresolved questions taking as case studies the Brazilian National Truth Commission (hereafter NTC) and other Latin American commissions: To what extent can we conceive of commissions as local, national, or global tools? What are their stated and de facto political and socio-economic objectives? In order to answer these questions, the symposium is divided into three main sections ranging from the local and historically specific (Brazilian model) to the global and general (truth commissions in the twenty-first century). The first section provides a timely in-depth assessment of the continent’s most recent commission – the Brazilian NTC with its historically unique structure – a National Commission and a network of approximately 80 local commissions. The second part compares the Brazilian NTC with previous truth commissions in Latin America in order to contrast the commissions’ historical functions and legacies from a national or global (or “entangled”) perspective, respectively. The third section discusses the tension between a process of global “diffusion” or “transnationalisation” of commissions and their locally specific implementation/invention, and critically revisits the contrasting scholarly methods of analysis.

A Truth Commission in Brazil? Challenges and perspectives to integrate human rights and democracy

The paper to be presented aims to evaluate the creation of the National Truth Commission in Brazil and its effort to integrate human rights and democratic means to account past violations. First, it tries to establish a normative view according to which the Amnesty Law enacted in 1979 is not valid because it violates what Rainer Forst calls a “basic right to justification.” In addition it reviews and challenges the normative foundations of the decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which recently condemned the Brazilian state. According to the Court’s view, the only legitimate way a country has to make violations of human rights accountable is by means of criminal justice. This perspective, the article argues, is too narrow and must include truth commissions as well.

Nina Schneider, ‘ “Too little too late” or “premature”? The Brazilian Truth Commission and the Question of “best timing” ’, Journal of Iberian and Latin-American Research (JILAR), Vol. 19, No. 1 (2013), pp. 149-162.

This article combines empirical findings on recent Brazilian history and theoretical questions related to the timing and nature of mechanisms associated with political transitions by raising the controversial question of whether the recently inaugurated Brazilian Truth Commission is 'too little too late' or even 'premature'. After locating it in its wider historical context, this article introduces key competing opinions about the Brazilian Truth Commission, which has been perceived as belated and weak in comparison with those of other Latin American countries. Yet, rather than aligning itself with any of these positions, the Brazilian Truth Commission serves to exemplify that there is neither a generic nor an 'impartial' solution to the question of best practice and timing-any evaluation of the Commission depends on its specific goals and key target group. Processes of transition are neither linear nor predictable; they constitute power struggles, depend on the population's interest in the past, and can take on a dynamic of their own.

Brazilian Truth Commissions as Experiments of Representation: Between Impartiality and Proximity

Representation, 2018

The establishment of the National Truth Commission (NTC) in Brazil investigated human rights violations perpetrated by the civil-military dictatorship and triggered the subsequent creation of a large number of sub-national truth commissions. These commissions were established in myriad ways, but they are all non-elected bodies that lack traditional voters' authorisation and accountability mechanisms at their inception. Nonetheless, their actors have created a large body of representative claims to support their actions, the examination of which is the purpose of this article. The analysis is based on data collected by the author, including interviews with commissioners. There is a widespread agreement about the ethical objectives of human rights advocacy and the shared assumption that exposing the "truth" about the violent past is a means to achieve these objectives. Conversely, there is substantial disagreement about the driving values behind the commissions, which can to some extent be described by the notions of active impartiality, proximity and perspective. I conclude that the fundamental shared trait of the representative claims deployed by the sub-national truth commissions in Brazil involves conceptualising victims as legitimate representatives, who are qualified by the moral authority of their experience, in contrast with other national truth commissions.