How Latin America Is Holding Leaders Accountable for Past Rights Violations

The last few decades have seen Latin America experience the positive effects of a justice cascade, defined as the “new global trend of holding political leaders criminally accountable for past human rights violations through domestic and international prosecutions.” Regional courts, Latin American countries, and Latin American–based NGOs are acting as important protagonists of this trend.

This has allowed human rights actors to, for example, resort to universal jurisdiction arguments in foreign courts in order to bring forward otherwise domestically blocked suits against Latin American human rights violators.

At a recent event, scholars Dr. Kathryn Sikkink and Dr. César Rodríguez-Garavito examined how and why Latin America has managed to achieve their own justice cascade and how Latin American NGOs representing victims have been particularly effective in using the interaction between domestic and international accountability processes to achieve better results than either alone could offer.

Listen above.