International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human
<p>On 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was standing at the altar of a small chapel in San Salvador, raising the chalice during evening Mass, when a single rifle shot fired from the back of the church killed him. The day before, he had used his Sunday sermon to address the soldiers of El Salvador’s army directly, pleading with them to stop killing their own people: “In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.” He was murdered for it, by a right-wing death squad, on the eve of a civil war that would consume the country for twelve years. Three decades later, the United Nations chose the anniversary of his death for the International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims.</p>
<p>The day’s unwieldy title carries an unusual legal idea. It holds that victims, their families and whole societies have a right to know the facts about grave abuses, who carried them out and why, and that this right is something distinct, worth naming and defending on its own.</p>
<h2 id="romero-and-the-choice-of-date">Romero and the choice of date</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>Óscar Romero was not, at first, the firebrand he became. Appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was seen by the country’s establishment as a safe, conservative choice. What changed him was the murder of his friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, weeks after his appointment, and the escalating slaughter of peasants, catechists and activists by state forces and allied death squads. Romero turned his weekly radio sermons into a record of the disappeared and the dead, reading out names the government wanted forgotten, until he became the most prominent voice against the repression and, inevitably, a target.</p>
<p>His killing went unpunished for years; a later UN-backed truth commission concluded that the order had come from a right-wing leader connected to the death squads. Romero was beatified in 2015 and canonised by Pope Francis on 14 October 2018, becoming Saint Óscar Romero. When the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the day on 21 December 2010, choosing 24 March, the resolution explicitly recognised his work and values, honouring a man who had paid with his life for insisting that the truth be spoken aloud.</p>
<h2 id="what-the-right-to-the-truth-actually-means">What “the right to the truth” actually means</h2>
<p>The phrase sounds abstract, but it has a concrete history in law. It emerged largely from the experience of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, where military regimes “disappeared” tens of thousands of people, denying both the killings and the bodies, leaving families to search for relatives who had simply vanished. Out of that anguish came a legal claim: that the state has a duty to investigate, to preserve archives and memory, and to tell families what became of those who were taken.</p>
<p>Regional human-rights courts, particularly the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, gave the principle teeth through their rulings, and truth commissions across Latin America, South Africa and elsewhere put it into practice. The right is now understood as the foundation on which justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence are built, because none of those is possible while the facts remain buried.</p>
<p>The Argentine experience shows what this looks like in practice. After the military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 disappeared an estimated thirty thousand people, the return to democracy brought CONADEP, the national commission on the disappeared, whose 1984 report <em>Nunca Más</em> (“Never Again”) documented the regime’s secret detention centres in unbearable detail. Decades of legal battles followed, including the eventual prosecution of officers and the painstaking work of forensic anthropologists and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to identify remains and to locate children stolen from murdered parents and raised by their captors. Each recovered name, each restored identity, was the right to the truth made concrete rather than declared in the abstract.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>Atrocities such as genocide, torture, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance are very often committed by the very authorities meant to protect people, and they thrive on concealment. A regime that disappears its critics depends on the public never quite knowing what happened. To establish the truth, then, is not merely a comfort to the bereaved; it is the first crack in the wall of impunity. Accountability cannot begin until the facts are known, and cycles of violence are difficult to break while official lies stand unchallenged.</p>
<p>The day also matters because it dignifies the victims. People who have survived torture or lost relatives to disappearance frequently face stigma and disbelief on top of their trauma; having the truth officially acknowledged is a form of recognition that the harm was real and that the loss counts. The same insistence that suffering be named and not minimised runs through related observances such as the <a href="/specialdate/day-of-remembrance-for-all-victims-of-chemical-warfare/">Day of Remembrance for All Victims of Chemical Warfare</a>, where remembrance is offered to people history might otherwise reduce to a statistic.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-observed-around-the-world">How it is observed around the world</h2>
<p>The day is marked by human-rights organisations, governments and civil-society groups across many countries through memorial services, public lectures, film screenings and exhibitions that document past abuses. In El Salvador and across Latin America the date carries particular weight, tied as it is to Romero, and commemorations there often draw large crowds. Truth commissions, memory museums and archives use the occasion to highlight their continuing work of gathering testimony and opening records.</p>
<p>The United Nations human-rights bodies typically issue statements reaffirming the right to the truth and reminding states of their obligations to investigate and to keep their archives accessible. Educational institutions link the historical lessons to present-day struggles, drawing a line from the disappeared of the past to the impunity that still shields perpetrators in many places today.</p>
<p>In El Salvador, the day is inseparable from Romero himself. Pilgrims gather at his tomb in the crypt of San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral, and at the small chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia where he was shot, now preserved as a place of memory alongside the modest house where he lived. Since his canonisation in 2018, the commemorations have drawn larger crowds and a more official sanction, a striking reversal for a man whose killers acted with the tacit protection of the state. The contrast captures something the day is built to mark: that the truth a regime tries to suppress can, given enough time and enough insistence, become the version a nation chooses to honour.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-traditions">Symbols and traditions</h2>
<p>The most enduring symbol associated with the day is the photograph held aloft. Across Latin America, the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, most famously the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, marched holding pictures of their missing children, and that image of a face on a placard has become shorthand for the demand to know. Candles, moments of silence and the public reading of victims’ names recur in commemorations, each insisting that the lost were individuals with names and stories, not figures in a report.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The day’s central figure, <strong>Óscar Romero</strong>, was made a saint in 2018, an unusual case of a Catholic martyr whose death also anchors a secular United Nations human-rights observance.</li>
<li>The “right to the truth” took legal shape largely through the <strong>Inter-American Court of Human Rights</strong>, whose rulings on Latin American disappearances helped turn a moral claim into an enforceable principle.</li>
<li>The resolution proclaiming the day was adopted on <strong>21 December 2010</strong>, but it deliberately reaches back thirty years to a single killing in 1980 for its date.</li>
<li>The day was proposed at the UN partly through the efforts of <strong>El Salvador and other Latin American states</strong>, the very region whose dictatorships had pioneered enforced disappearance as a tool of terror.</li>
<li>The South African <strong>Truth and Reconciliation Commission</strong>, often cited as the model for trading full disclosure for amnesty, is one of more than forty such bodies established worldwide since the 1970s.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="truth-justice-and-what-comes-after">Truth, justice and what comes after</h2>
<p>The right to the truth does not stand alone. It is the first of a chain that runs through justice, reparation and guarantees that the abuses will not happen again, and the day exists in part to make that connection visible. Truth commissions have shown how the patient documentation of past crimes, the gathering of testimony and the opening of archives, can help a fractured society confront its history rather than bury it. Yet truth on its own is rarely enough. Survivors and families often look beyond the facts for acknowledgement, accountability and meaningful redress, whether in the form of prosecutions, public apologies, memorials or reformed institutions.</p>
<p>That fuller reckoning is why the day belongs to the same family of commitments as <a href="/specialdate/human-rights-day/">Human Rights Day</a>, which marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Knowing the truth is the threshold; honouring the rights it reveals is the work that follows.</p>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is something quietly radical about enshrining a right to know. Powerful institutions have always preferred forgetting, the convenient blur, the lost file, the official version that hardens into accepted fact. To insist instead that the truth is owed, not as a favour but as a right, is to side with the families still holding up photographs of faces the state would rather no one remembered. Romero died because he read names aloud. The day named for him asks whether we are willing to keep reading them.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
