ABSTRACT
Transitional justice, as commonly understood, presupposes a reference to human rights. Although measures that have been taken in the name of transitional justice vary, human rights has functioned as a common legal code, its status sometimes underwritten by a bill of rights forming the core of a constitution that, once the transition is complete, is to govern future relations between a given state and its citizens. For this nexus, South Africa has, for some time, provided the model. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–2003) received a mandate, envisaged in the interim national constitution, to investigate gross human rights violations committed in defense of the apartheid state and in the struggle against it. The acts for which it was empowered to grant or withhold amnesty were defined in the same terms. The public hearings at which people testified to what had been done to them or their kin were known as Human Rights Violation Hearings, or HRV Hearings. It soon became clear to observers and commentators that those witnesses were being asked to formulate what they had suffered in terms that allowed for classification according to a definite table of violations. Let us recall the exasperation, however, with which one of the Truth Commissioners declared to a witness: “We wish that you bear in mind that there are six more witnesses which we still have to take. Could you please in summary form, as the person is asking you … give us human rights violations which were done to you by the ANC [i]n those camps” (Williams 1996). Although objections against this prescription were raised by journalists and scholarly commentators, some of whom displayed a touching naïveté about juridical mediation, the basic pattern of questioning pursued by the Commission did not change.
