Transitional Justice as a Modern Oedipus: The Emergence of a Right to Truth: The Emergence of a Right to Truth

This article offers a critical reflection on the emergence of a “right to truth” in international law and transitional justice. Analyzing the right to truth as invoked in the paradigmatic case of Argentina in light of Sophocles’s King Oedipus, this article challenges the assumption common among human rights scholars that truth, law, and democratization necessarily go hand in hand. Although the right to truth empowered new actors and gave voice and recognition to relatives of victims of disappearance, it also posed dangers for important values associated with the rule of law and democratic deliberation. I argue that under the banner of scientific truth, important distinctions between legal and political discourse are erased, and a narrow scientific truth about DNA is taken as a substitute for political and historical investigation, thus undermining the democratic debate