The rights to memory and truth in the inter-American paradigms of transitional justice: The cases of Brazil and Chile

Abstract

The paper deals with the rights of society to the truth and the memory regarding serious violations of human rights during authoritarian regimes. To do so, the legal parameters of transitional justice established by the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and, from them, the methods of comparative law are used, directing the analysis to a comparison between the experiences of commissions of truth and memory in Brazil and Chile, observing their positive and negative points, based on the established objectives to favour the consolidation of a democratic State with rule of law where the knowledge and memory of the truth can avoid new authoritarian regimes. With this objective, a qualitative research was carried out on the truth commissions established by official initiative in Brazil and Chile, from their official reports. The obtained results relate to the verification of the level at which these countries are in terms of concretization of memory and truth, based on the parameters of the Inter-American System, considering the advances made and the gaps still present.