Reparations are now understood as not only war damages but also compensation and other measures provided to victims of severe human rights violations by the parties responsible.
As a result of the commission's recommendations, the government symbolically issued an apology in a "Statement of Reconciliation", admitting that the schools were designed on racist models of assimilation.
[19] In 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people of Canada in the House of Commons and announced reparations that would be made to citizens who were injured by specific actions of the State.
However, these initiatives have also been criticized on a variety of grounds, such as their refusal to identify the perpetrators of violence and their failure to recognize a comprehensive range of victims to whom reparations are due.
These women, some as young as twelve years old, were coerced and abducted from their homes and placed in military controlled facilities where they would serve as sex slaves to the imperial army.
Shortly after he ascended the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI created the Independent Arbitration Commission (IAC) to compensate the victims of forced disappearances and arbitrary detention.
The IAC decided more than 5,000 cases and awarded a total of US$100 million, but victims and their families complained of lack of transparency in the tribunal's procedures and demanded truth seeking measures in addition to financial compensation.
The IER issued a reparations policy that upheld notions of gender equity and resulted in roughly US$85 million in financial compensation paid to almost 10,000 individuals, as well as recommendations on other measures such as the provision of health care and restoration of civil rights.
Other reparations programs have been proposed and/or implemented in: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, El Salvador, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, Malawi, Liberia, South Africa, Kenya, the United States, and others.
Finally financial reparations were provided on August 10, 1988, after President Ronald Reagan passed a bill to authorize payment of $20,000 to the survivors of the camps.
[27] Dehumanization is “the failure to recognize an individual or group’s humanity” and infantilization is “the restriction of an individual or group’s autonomy based on the failure to recognize and respect their full capacity to reason.”[26] Evidence of a dignity taking can be established empirically through either a top-down approach, examining the motive and intent behind those who initiated the taking, or a bottom-up approach, examining the viewpoints of dispossessed people.
[27] Dignity restoration is a remedy that seeks to provide dispossessed individuals and communities with material compensation through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency.
[26] In practical terms, the remedial process places dispossessed individuals or communities in the driver's seat and gives them a significant degree of autonomy in deciding how they are made whole.
[28] Since then, many scholars across disciplines have applied these socio-legal concepts to an array of case studies in various time periods and geographic locations, providing a transnational, historicized approach to understanding involuntary property loss and its material and non-material consequences.
The guidelines explicitly state that their intent is to restore victims to their status in a time of peace, but the distribution of rights and resources often wasn't equal in peacetime.
Thus reparations, if their intent is to return a society to its status quo, run the risk of ignoring systemic oppression and reproducing social hierarchies.
"[35] Some of these concerns can be addressed by empowering women to have a voice in the reparations process, challenging discriminatory practices, and educating communities about sexual violence.