The Complementarity Paradigm: Tracing the Transitional Justice Blueprint in the Inter-American System of Human Rights

Abstract

ABSTRACT∞ The promotion of ‘home-grown’ approaches to transitional justice is a powerful trope animating the field, encouraging local ownership of transitional justice processes, and refusing ‘one size fits all’ formulas. I challenge this account by exploring how the obligations resulting from anti-impunity’s advent yield only one particular institutional design that seems compatible with obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights. This means that the state’s autonomy to institutionally design a transition is increasingly narrowed in the Inter-American System of Human Rights. I develop this argument by exploring how the right to truth is enforced, showing that the interaction between regional obligations and truth as a right yields a specific transitional institutional blueprint. In doing so, I unpack legal techniques that assist in framing as necessary a transitional justice model that is a contingent, and reckon with its implications.