The cascade of justice and the impact of human rights trials in Latin America

Abstract

Since the 1980s, states have increasingly sought to address past human rights violations through the use of a variety of transitional justice mechanisms, including domestic and international human rights trials. By the middle of that decade, scholars of transitions to democracy generally concluded that prosecutions for past human rights violations were politically unsustainable and could undermine new democracies. More recently, some international relations scholars have echoed the pessimistic claims of those early "trial skeptics" and have added doubts about the impact of trials. However, there are few empirical studies covering several countries that aim to test these claims, partly because of the lack of a database on such trials.