Institutional responses to gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law may affect future human rights records, partly by contributing to the collective memory of the dark chapters in a nation's history. This article begins with an exploration of various theoretical ideas concerning the impact of legal responses on collective memory and cultural trauma. It examines ways of empirically measuring the effects of law trials on collective memory, systematically analyzing the procedures adopted in recent studies into the collective memory of atrocities. Here it takes as examples the Vietnam and Balkan wars as reported in the New York Times and described in textbooks on the History of the United States. Some of the findings from these studies are explored, indicating the conditional and selective effects of criminal trials on collective memory. Finally, the article draws some conclusions for future research in Latin America and elsewhere.
Human Rights; Atrocities; War Crimes; Genocide; Tribunals; Collective Memory