Accountability Advocates: The Long and Winding Road to Justice in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Since the return of democracy to Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of human rights and transitional justice have explained the onset of different policies of truth and justice across the region with reference to several macro-level explanatory factors, including the role of international pressure, government preferences, the judiciary, veto powers, and civil society.
In this panel, we focus instead on a more micro level focus, by introducing the concept of accountability advocates (Lessa 2018). This is a cross-cutting concept that transcends previously existing categories and aims to capture how actors working in favour for accountability exist at all levels, both domestically and internationally. And how these sympathetic actors, which are strategic in the struggle against impunity, can be found not only within civil society, but also within the judiciary and government. Accountability advocates are the crucial entrepreneurs pushing ahead policies of truth and justice and without which the latter often would not emerge.
We use both country-based and thematic case studies to discuss the importance of this concept, including from Guatemala (Burt), Argentina (Balardini), Chile (Lira), corporate complicity (Payne) and transnational crimes (Lessa).

Sub Track

• Human Rights and Memory

Session Organizer

• Francesca Lessa, University of Oxford

Chair

• Kathryn A Sikkink, Harvard University

Discussant

• Alison Brysk, University of California Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• State actions after State crimes: the monitoring role of the public prosecutors in the transitional justice process in Argentina - Lorena Balardini, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)

• Guatemala’s Politics of Accountability: Leadership War Crimes Trials - Jo-Marie Burt, George Mason University

• Against Impunity: Justice Entrepreneurs, Operation Condor, and Accountability in South America - Francesca Lessa, University of Oxford

• Reparar lo irreparable: la judicialización de los casos de tortura de mujeres en la Corte Suprema de Chile - Elízabeth Lira, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• Making Justice Possible: The Institutional Innovators in Business and Human Rights - Leigh A Payne, University of Oxford