The last three decades have seen the development of (government sanctioned) bodies of inquiry into viable restorative justice measures for massive human rights violations. This paper argues that, in cases of TJ blockage, the grounding of human rights on legal foundations in reports further ruptures communities as it engenders a paradox: the legal methodology seems to be hopeful with regard to future legal punitive redress, but the unchanged legal and political context which motivated the commission path initially invalidates those aspirations, breeding victim frustration. Initially conceptualized as arising from the inquiry bodies' relationships to the constituted powers, the legalization of rights has more to do with the interpretation of mandates in line with the commissioners' personal backgrounds. The paper analyses two cases of commissions with limited governmental involvement, namely Guatemalan Interdiocese Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (1998) and the Uruguayan Historic Inquiry on the Disappeared Detainees (2007) and their consequences. It argues that, unlike the more conciliatory moral foundation of the first, the latter employed persistent legal conceptualizations of human rights which, when interpreted as a signal of TJ opening by victims groups, led to dissafection as mobilizations against the Expiry Law and failed to deliver positive referendum results. Granted that, by design, commissions of inquiry need not appeal to legal principles, but rather shed light on patterns of human rights violations, certain pragmatic treatment of the limited legal and political is more suited to the end goal of producing a reconciliatory consensus over past events.
