Right to truth

[3] In 1977, Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions enshrined a right for families of people killed in armed conflicts to find out what happened to their relatives.

[10] The right to truth has been recognized in international soft law instruments such as the United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity (2005)[11][12] and UN General Assembly Resolution 60/147, as well as by the 2011 appointment of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of non-Recurrence.

[17] In Saadoun v. Algeria (2003), regarding a man who was forcibly disappeared during the Algerian Civil War, the Committee determined that failure to investigate gave rise to a new violation of the ICCPR.

[20] In 1985, six years before Guatemala accepted the jurisdiction of the IACHR, American journalist Nicholas Blake disappeared.

In Blake v. Guatemala (1998), the IACHR determined that Guatemalan efforts to obstruct his family's search for the truth constituted inhuman treatment contrary to the American Convention on Human Rights.

[25][26] Legal scholar James A. Sweeney criticized the ECtHR's approach to right-to-truth cases: the ECtHR’s 'underlying values' test could have led the way in promoting internationally the notion that present-day denial or obstruction of the quest for truth about the gravest pre-ratification human rights abuses may amount, in itself, to a contemporary human rights violation.

[32][33] The Inter-American Court and some theorists have suggested that truth-telling may be a form of partial reparations to victims of human rights abuses.