Publication of Report on ‘Lawyers & Transition in Chile’

We have just published the second in our series of policy-orientated reports – Lawyers & Transition in Chile / Abogados & Transición en Chile.

The report was prepared by Professor Cath Collins, in association with the Lawyers, Conflict & Transition team.

Professor Collins joined the Transitional Justice Institute at the Ulster University in March 2013. She was previously Associate Professor of Politics at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, where she founded and directed the Human Rights Observatory, a project mapping justice, truth and memory developments in Chile related to the Pinochet era dictatorship.

Chile is widely recognised as a classic case of transition after authoritarian rule and it thus provided a model for truth, justice, reparations and amnesty programmes in other countries, including South Africa.

In this paper we look in turn at: law and legal culture in Chilean society; the role and agency of lawyers during the dictatorship (1973-90); the contribution of lawyers to the transition (1990-98); and the profile of cause lawyering and human rights in contemporary Chile.

Our primary motivation was to produce an accessible and constructive overview that might be of use to practitioners in Chile, not least in pointing up areas for further research and analysis. Beyond this, we trust that this report will be of interest and relevance to a wide range of global policymakers and donors, international legal collectives and civil society associations.