Explaining Post-Transitional Justice

Abstract

In scholarship on human rights policies during democratic transitions, the focus has been on the executive for too long. It is time to shift attention to another important actor: the courts. Although many scholars have written on the courts in recent years, the links between constitutional reform and justice for past human rights violations remain largely unexplored. The main argument presented in this chapter is that constitutional reforms have made Latin American judges more prone to prosecute the military for past human right violations because judges now enjoy more independence from powerful executives and the hierarchy of the judicial system has loosened, making lower court judges less dependent on their superiors. As a result, judges, especially those sympathetic to a human rights agenda, can push prosecutions more forcefully than they could before.