Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America Truth, Extra-Territorial Courts, and the Process of Justice

This book studies how victims of human rights violations in Latin America, their families, and their advocates work to overcome entrenched impunity and seek legal justice. Their struggles show that legal justice is a multifaceted process, the overarching purpose of which is to restore human dignity and prevent further violence. Uncovering, revealing, and proving the truth are essential elements of legal justice, and are also powerful tools to activate the process. When faced with stubborn impunity at home, victims, families, and advocates can carry on their work for legal justice by bringing cases in courts in other countries or in the inter-American human rights system. These extra-territorial courts can jump-start the process of legal justice at home. Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America examines the political and legal struggle through the lens of the human story at the heart of these cases.

1. Building justice from truth - the process begins; 2. Reconstituting human dignity and the process of legal justice; 3. Truth and the process of justice; 4. The foundation of justice: the rights to truth and information; 5. Moving the process and proving the truth; 6. Exposing the truth and jump starting the process in extra-territorial courts; 7. The effect of extra-territorial courts on the process of justice and conclusion.

Jeffrey Davis is Chair and Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He has taught human rights law, international law, constitutional law and comparative law for more than ten years and has won several teaching awards. He is the author of Justice across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in US Courts (Cambridge, 2008) and has published articles on human rights accountability, the inter-American human rights system, and judicial decision making. Research for this book was conducted in part while serving as a visiting scholar at the University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica, site of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.