The human rights confessional

A reconfiguration of the moral order of difference through international law can be clearly seen in the two interrelated ways that the worst abuses of states are recognized and remedied: in state-sponsored apologies and forums of truth and reconciliation. One of the most unusual features of the global rights regime is a moral/legal development in which the act of apology and the truth and reconciliation commission have together become the most significant and legitimate methods by which the collective harm wrought by the state is acknowledged and remedied. Public apologies and truth and reconciliation commissions have become like confessionals for states. As expressed by Desmond Tutu, the state apology becomes an expression of love: “[A]s a nation we are saying, we are sorry, we have opened the wounds of your suffering and sought to cleanse them; this reparation is a balm, an ointment, being poured over the wounds to assist in their healing” Expressing essentially the same point more prosaically, anthropologist R.A. Wilson points out that in South Africa, “national legal discourse did not contain the language with which to undertake its own rehabilitation, and the liminality of the TRCallowed it to plagiarize from a religious idiom.” This suggests something odd about the processes of apology and of truth and reconciliation: there is a widely shared expectation that misguided states, through their personnel, should express deep human feelings of personal regret and desire for absolution. There is no manifestation of genocidal violence or other form of systemic political abuse so severe that it overrides the legitimacy of public contrition inscribed in international law. Their most important feature is that they are public, that the sins of the state are exposed to the light of day.

One of the central goals of apology and testimony in these human rights remedies is the conceptual reform or “re-education” of the citizen-bases of those states identified as having committed human rights violations in their recent history. In some circumstances the rights-affirming ideas associated with apology and truth and reconciliation are inconsistent with durable prejudices and propaganda for which the state is being held responsible. This introduces a tension between the judgments and moral content of human rights as expressed in the state’s language of contrition and the misguided ideas once tolerated or cultivated by the state, which may still be held by a significant segment of the citizenry. The central significance of the apology and truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) as human rights remedies lies in the fact that they call upon states to take an active part in the persuasion of its domestic publics, to undertake efforts to bring popular opinion more in line with the moral universals of human rights. Human rights do not just use persuasion as a direct source of shame against the perpetrators of rights violations, but as an active instrument of their rehabilitation.