One of our historic institutional objectives includes the eradication of impunity and dismantling of mechanisms used by individuals, governments and special interest groups to sidestep any sort of accountability for their role in serious human rights violations.

Through the years, we´ve worked towards these goals by shedding light on cases which had been kept in the dark for decades; working hand in hand with national judicial systems to give back a sense of justice to local courts; giving a voice to all those individuals and institutions who were silenced by their governments; and putting an end to amnesties that undermined the right to truth, justice and reparation.

One of the key areas in our fight against impunity included pursuing cases that sought to limit the application of amnesties for crimes against humanity and serious violations of human rights. Thanks to the work of CEJIL, important steps were made towards justice, not only to eliminate amnesty laws but also to identify, judge and punish those responsible for those crimes.

The case of Barrios Altos resulted in a landmark decision that led to the extradition, trial and conviction of Alberto Fujimori. Moreover, the ruling established an important precedent in international law which states that amnesties cannot pardon serious human rights violations to the detriment of the rights of the victims and society, in their pursuit for the right to the truth, justice, and reparation.

This case, as well as La Cantuta, are among the most cited cases in international and comparative law. Furthermore, their impact in neighboring countries is also evident. CEJIL, for example, accompanied the victims of the El Mozote Massacre and neighboring communities in the litigation before the Inter-American System, getting the Inter American Court to establish that the 1993 amnesty law in El Salvador could not be an obstacle to the investigation of these crimes. Recently, in 2016, the Constitutional Court of this country resolved to declare the Amnesty Law unconstitutional based on the ruling by the Inter-American Court, among other resolutions.

The case of Gelman v. Uruguay further underscored the incompatibility of amnesty laws with a States’ international obligation to duly investigate and punish those responsible for serious human rights violations, as they violated a victim’s right to truth. The Inter-American Court found these laws were illegal regardless of their form, or whether they had been adopted through a democratic process supported by the votes of citizens. In particular, the Court clearly established that “the protection of human rights constitutes an insurmountable limit to the rule of the majority, in other words, to the sphere of the susceptible to be decided by the majority”.

Along with the countless acts of violence which took place in States across the region, authoritarian regimes also used enforced disappearances as a tool of repression.

For two decades, this method was used in El Salvador, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, Haiti and Mexico. Amnesty International, FEDEFAM and other human rights organizations claim that, in just twenty years (1966-1986), ninety thousand people were victims of this atrocious practice throughout Latin America.

CEJIL has worked to expose similar practices, and to eliminate all traces of impunity. This work has prompted changes in numerous occasions. For example, as a result of the Heliodoro Portugal case in Panama, the country was able to modify the definition of the crime of enforced disappearance. In Peru, the Inter-American Court found the State responsible for the disappearance of Kenneth Ney Anzualdo. And in Guatemala, in the case of the forced disappearance of Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, four of the five high-ranking military accused of participating in crimes against humanity were found guilty.