Argentina’s involvement with GAAMAC is closely related to its own national experience of eradicating impunity for crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Since the return of democracy in 1983, Argentina has built, with the decisive impulse of a vibrant movement of human rights organizations, a unique process of Memory, Truth and Justice. It is based on the establishment of the truth – the facts – regarding what happened through the publication of official reports and investigations; but above all in the prosecution of those responsible for these atrocity crimes.

Faced with the commission of atrocity crimes, Argentina decided to analyze its own recent past in order to eradicate impunity as the only credible and sustainable way of promoting the non-repetition of similar acts. Accountability before justice is key, in this sense, not only to repair the social fabric as a whole, but also to lay the foundations for an agenda of prevention of mass atrocities in the future.

From this national experience and the policies developed to support it, taking its commitment to the international scene was a logical step for Argentina.

Argentina’s involvement with GAAMAC

Being part of GAAMAC, working for its consolidation, is Argentina’s way of cooperating at the international level with an agenda of mass atrocities prevention: if GAAMAC meets its objectives, other States and peoples will have more and better tools to develop mass atrocity prevention policies.

Argentina sees its foreign human rights policy as one closely related to our own national human rights agenda: participation in GAAMAC, in this sense, is a natural consequence of its foreign policy priorities to promote and protect human rights.