Between politics and history: the Baltic truth commissions in global perspective

ENMemory and truth initiatives (broadly understood as the investigation and dissemination of facts about human rights violations and the context in which they took place) became an important component of transitional justice practice in many regions of the world in the 1990s and the 2000s, including postcommunist transition countries such as Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, and Uzbekistan. Postcommunist fact-finding bodies have remained challenging to label, as some observers characterized them as truth commissions, while others found these efforts did not qualify as formal truth commissions due to problems with their mandate limits, autonomy, or other operational aspects.1 This chapter focuses on Baltic fact-finding bodies, examining the accomplishments and shortcomings of commissions in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by situating them in the context of the global popularity of truth commissions in the 1990s and the 2000s. While the Baltic commissions do not satisfy most of the definitional criteria used for truth commissions insofar as their forensic investigation, temporal scope, and relationship to victims were concerned, their work highlights many of the promises and challenges that truth commissions face in their engagement with social memory debates.2 They are part of a broader trend in which truth commissions arc created years after a regime change to investigate not only recent violence and violations, but also those rights violations that took place in the distant past. [...].