Teaching in Truth. A Vision of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the Articulation Between Truth, Feelings and Human Rights

This text — written while the CVR was midway through its work — was presented as a doctoral thesis in International Human Rights Law. However, it is less concerned with establishing the legal standing of the CVR than with contributing to ensuring that bodies such as Truth Commissions advance that supreme legal and cultural endeavor of building a fraternal world, through the education of feelings and the organization of social vigilance in favor of Human Rights. When any individual or group regards others as inferior, or chooses to pursue particular interests that can only be achieved at others' expense, they will, if they attain sufficient power, impose discriminatory law. On the contrary, when power is attained by those who have come to feel every other person as "one of us" and to regard them as having equal rights, then they open the way for egalitarian law, such as that of the Universal Declaration, by exercising effective oversight of respect for Human Rights.