A Right to Understand Injustice: Epistemology and the “Right to the Truth” in International Human Rights Discourse

Abstract

People's “right to truth” or their “right to know” about their government's human rights abuses is a growing consensus in human rights discourses and a fertile area of work in international and humanitarian law. In most discussions of this right to know the truth, it is commonly seen as requiring the state or international institutions to provide access to evidence of the violations. In this paper, I argue that such a right naturally has many epistemic aspects, and the tools of social epistemology can be helpful in elucidating what such a right entails. As a beginning for this project, I draw on those resources to argue that the right to know the truth is only meaningful if it includes a right to understand the abuses, and that such understanding can only come through the development of community epistemic capacities. Given this, I further argue that the state has a duty to support the development of these capacities, and that a critical place for beginning this process is in public schools.

The judicial implementation of the right to the truth: Some thoughts on the Argentinian experience of the Juicios por la Verdad

“…70 Its famous Report Nunca Mas (Never Again) -also known as the Sábato Report -documents almost 9,000 cases of enforced disappearances, remaining one of the most complete writings on the repressive system implemented by the dictatorship to this day. 71 The historic Juicio a las Juntas (the Trial of the Juntas) beg an on 22 April 1985. Albeit not without difficulties, 72 the military leaders were thus tried for the crimes they had committed in the context of the Proceso.…”

Revisiting the past: human rights education and epistemic justice

“…The problem encountered in HRE is thus how historical narratives of human rights only address western subjects and how present-day narratives of human rights only locate their urgency in other countries-human rights used as trump cards by governments in international relations-while ignoring violations 'at home'. The dominant, and particularistic, historical and present-day narratives of human rights are a result of, and a continuation of, epistemic injustice in HRE (Lupin Townsend & Townsend, 2021;Werkheiser, 2020).…”