The Goldstone Commission in South Africa’s Transition: Linking Gradual Institutional Change and Information-Gathering Institutions
Abstract
Used by states to investigate patterns of past human rights abuses, truth commissions have garnered considerable consensus for their value in addressing past harms and repression. Many still tout the South African model as a success story of truth commissions. This dissertation provides answers to two questions. First, what role, if any, did earlier investigative institutions play in shaping South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)? The dissertation argues that the Commission of Inquiry for the Prevention of Public Violence and Intimidation, also known as the Goldstone Commission, played a central role in transforming information- gathering measures in South Africa. Second, what were the contributing institutional developments of the Goldstone Commission, and how do we characterize these contributions? The dissertation argues that the Goldstone Commission’s founding conditions, its institutional design, and its impartial investigations, created the conditions for the process of gradual institutional change in the Goldstone Commission as a commission of inquiry. The Commission’s credibility helped to strengthen information gathering during the negotiating period in South Africa and facilitated further change in information-gathering capacities, including the incorporation of witness protection. The dissertation also traces gradual institutional change in the use of amnesty to situate its eventual implementation as an information-gathering mechanism by the TRC. The South African TRC benefited from the operation of the Goldstone Commission in terms of investigative credibility and institutional experience. This dissertation makes the case that to better understand truth commission design and operation it is necessary to take institutional histories into account.