In recent years several countries in Latin America have sought to prosecute human rights violations and war crimes in domestic tribunals. Peru has been at the forefront of such efforts, most notably the 2009 conviction of former president Alberto Fujimori for human rights violations. Yet hundreds of other criminal trials for human rights violations are currently ongoing in Peru. Very little is known about this process, which offers a rich empirical case study to examine the possibilities and limitations of domestic efforts to prosecute war crimes and other serious offenses in international law. This is especially important given that domestic efforts of this kind in Peru and a handful of other countries in Latin America offer an alternative model to the international and hybrid tribunals common elsewhere in the world. This paper will report on this researcher’s ongoing efforts to map domestic human rights trials in Peru through construction of a national data base that tracks the evolution of ongoing cases, as well as ethnographic research consisting of interviews with judicial operators, human rights lawyers and activists, survivors and family members of victims, and direct observation of human rights trials. The paper analyzes trends in Peru’s judicialization process and reflects on this case to illuminate key issues in domestic efforts to prosecute war crimes, including doctrinal issues (use of national versus international law in domestic prosecutions; applicability of statutes of limitations for such crimes); institutional issues (judicial capacity; independence of the judiciary); and political issues (popular perceptions of war crimes and support for war crimes tribunals; the role of the media; and state support or opposition for such trials). By drawing on the empirically rich case of Peru this paper offers important theoretical reflections on domestic efforts to prosecute war crimes and raises questions about the direction of future research on domestic accountability efforts for crimes against humanity.
