Processing Human Rights Violations in Peru: Characteristics and Difficulties

This document is a diagnosis — always open to improvement and subject to refinements arising from the flow of cases studied — of the ways in which the Peruvian judicial system has responded to the complex demands posed by cases investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as other similar cases brought by non-governmental human rights organizations, the Defensoría del Pueblo, or denounced directly by victims or their families. The diagnosis aims to identify the system's bottlenecks at a given point in time, so that an efficient training program for judicial operators can be developed, and so that greater awareness may foster and produce a favorable public push for the application of justice in human rights violation cases. The research takes into account successive reports by the Defensoría del Pueblo and adds the results of direct interviews with the main actors in the system, as well as focus groups conducted with judges, prosecutors, and members of the Policía Nacional.