PRESENTATION ON GUATEMALA Professor Elizabeth Olgesby: Balancing the Scales of Justice: How can a Commission Best Serve the Best Interests of the Victims while Promoting Reconciliation with Perpetrators? There is a little bit of basic data on the Guatemala case. I then have a few reflections at the very end about some of the contributions and challenges of the Guatemala truth Commission. The Truth Commission report was called “Memory of Silence’’. People in Guatemala had not been completely silent before the Truth Commission came along. Survivors had been speaking out and many human rights reports had been written. But it took a while to create the institutions for the Guatemalan society to be able to hear what people were saying. Actually the peace process started in the 1980s but a number of peace accords were signed in the 1990s including the accord that created the Commission for Historical Clarifications (CH) and it took testimonies in 1997 and 1998 and published its report in February 1999. As you know already, the Commission had three commissioners. There was the Head Commissioner, Christian Tomschat, who was a West German Human Rights Lawyer with a lot of international experience. Then there were two Guatemalan Commissioners who had been selected by Tomaschat himself from a list of names provided by the government and the rebels. There was quite a number of staff, around 300, divided between Guatemalans and international staff. So the Commission was an example of a ‘hybrid commission’. It was half national and half international. The Commission was initially under the United Nations Office of Projects and Service, but it was also somehow rooted in Guatemala. The CH was preceded in Guatemala by a very important Catholic Church led human rights project which was called Recovery of Historical Memory and 50 The Second International Conference on Transitional Justice in Zimbabwe