This paper aims to evaluate the creation of the National Truth Commission in Brazil and its effort to integrate human rights and democratic means to account past violations. First, it tries to establish a normative view according to which the Amnesty Law enacted in 1979 is not valid because it violates what Rainer Forst calls a "basic right to justification". In addition it reviews and challenges the normative foundations of the decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which recently condemned the Brazilian state. According to the Court's view, the only legitimate way a country has to make violations of human rights accountable is by means of criminal justice. This perspective, the article argues, is too narrow and must include truth commissions as well.
transitional justice; human rights; democracy; international criminal law