Inter-American Court of Human Rights' reparation judgments ...

40 Revista IIDH[Vol. 49Reparation, International Law and human rightsUbijus, ibi retnedium: Where there is a right, there is a remedy. Thismaxim has long been part of Common law legal systems and appearsin Civil law. The implication is that courts have the inherent power todevise the appropriate remedy to conclude cases that come within theirjurisdiction. Despite this, national and international courts of law oftencannot ensure that States provide effective redress of legal wrongs. Mostof them, as we will see later, grant economic compensations and palliativemeasures in place of remedies that would specifically undo the wrong: suchas substitute specific conduct by the wrongdoer, sanctions, and punishmentthat denies impunity. 23At the universal level, the United Nations Commission on HumanRights (UNCHR) has created various monitoring mechanisms thatdeal with particular human rights issues and remedies for human rightsviolations, outside the context of specific human rights treaties.In this sense, the most valuable efforts to bring together variousreparations rights have been the draft UN Basic Principles and theGuidelines on the Right to Reparation for Victims of Violations of HumanRights and International Humanitarian Law (1993) and the Question ofthe impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations (1997) by specialrapporteurs Theo van Boven and Louis Joinet, respectively.In the inter-American system the reparation’s classification is subdividedin:- Restitutio in integrum. This is the re-establishment of the situation thatexisted before the perpetration of the wrongful international act. Froma psychosocial point of view, this kind of reparation has been criticizedfor being utopian and disrespectful to the victims and their families’feelings, because after a gross violation nothing can be brought back to“normal”.- Pecuniary damages. These types of reparations include the monetarycompensations: lost income and consequential damages.23 Shelton, D., Remedies in International Human Rights Law Oxford UniversityPress, New York, US, 1999, p. 292.