IACHR

Press Release

IACHR Transitional Justice Training Workshop in El Salvador Concludes Successfully

November 16, 2018

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Washington, D.C. - A training workshop on transitional justice for members of El Salvador’s judiciary came to a successful end, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) announced. The workshop was part of a technical cooperation project to strengthen state capacities in the justice sector and was organized in collaboration with the Salvadoran Coordinating Committee for the Justice Sector through the Executive Technical Unit (UTE).

This training activity was part of the Regional Human Rights and Democracy Project currently being implemented by the IACHR and the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) with financial support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The aim of the project is to help strengthen knowledge of the Inter-American Human Rights System and its standards among key local stakeholders who are involved in protecting and defending human rights in the states of the Northern Triangle of Central America.

The workshop was divided into four consecutive modules held between August and November 2018. These lasted a total of 64 hours and were attended by more than 70 government officials from El Salvador’s justice sector. During the course, IACHR specialists and international experts discussed various key aspects of transitional justice. These include the right to truth, memory, and justice, the importance of conventionality control, the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity, inter-American standards relating to the forced disappearance of persons, third-party responsibility and patterns of crime, and the need for comprehensive reparations in cases of serious human rights violations.

The serious human rights violations that occurred during dictatorships and armed conflicts in the Americas have been addressed and discussed within the framework of the Inter-American System of Human Rights (IASHR). The commission has worked hard to monitor and protect human rights during these massive, systematic violations. In its jurisprudence, the inter-American system has also addressed state obligations and inter-American standards on what has been labeled “transitional justice.” Despite this, the workshop in El Salvador was the first four-month training program that the IACHR has organized away from its headquarters. The IACHR is grateful to all the organizations that enabled this training and state capacity-building workshop and helped make it a success.

A principal, autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS), the IACHR derives its mandate from the OAS Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The Inter-American Commission has a mandate to promote respect for and to defend human rights in the region and acts as a consultative body to the OAS in this area. The Commission is composed of seven independent members who are elected in an individual capacity by the OAS General Assembly and who do not represent their countries of origin or residence.

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