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Grounding Global Justice: International Networks and Domestic Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2006

CATH COLLINS
Affiliation:
Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs).
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Abstract

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The UK detention of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 was hailed at the time as an unprecedented demonstration of the possible efficacy of ‘global civil society’ networks in holding former heads of state to account for crimes against humanity. This article nonetheless questions the concept, as well as the practical efficacy, of globalised civil society action or ‘human rights lawyering’ as a trigger for the prosecution of past human rights violations. Based on extensive field research, the article argues that domestic factors, including domestic actor pressure and national judicial change, have proved more significant than international law or international activism in recent re-irruptions of the human rights accountability issue in Latin America's Southern Cone. The case of El Salvador, meanwhile, shows that transnational initiatives, while occasionally successful in their own right, have not been able to interrupt or foreshorten domestic post-transitional trajectories to the extent of independently creating favourable accountability conditions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

This paper is based on doctoral research carried out principally in Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, the UK and the US. It draws on approximately 150 interviews carried out with key judicial, political and third-sector actors between 2001 and 2005. Interview data was supplemented with analysis of original documentation including previously unresearched legal and archival material from Chile and El Salvador. See Cath Collins, ‘Post-transitional justice: legal strategies and accountability in Chile and El Salvador’, PhD thesis, University of London, 2005. The support of the Institute for the Study of the Americas and of the University of London's Central Research Fund is gratefully acknowledged. The author also wishes to thank Alex Wilde and Dr Rachel Sieder for generous assistance and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors or omissions are, of course, the author's own.