basis in order to award reparations in a particular case. In this regard the Committee clearly states in General Comment 3, I quote, “the importance of the victim participation in the redress process, and that the restoration of the dignity of the victim is the ultimate objective of the provision of redress.”16 Not listening to the victims’ needs can be very counterproductive for the implementation of reparation measures. And here I would like to mention, well actually a very sad example is, you know, Mexico is currently facing a huge tragedy caused by the violence of organized crime but also the response of the state to that violence. It has caused more than 100,000 killings, around 30,000 people disappeared, other thousands of people tortured. As part of this tragedy, a couple of years ago a big group of victims organized and started pressing the government to negotiate some reparation measures and what to do in this situation. This process had some very interesting results actually. The Victims Law,17 which deals in a very progressive way with the issue of reparations, was a product of these negotiations. I think General Comment 3 represents the opportunity for the Committee to expand its decisions on individual complaints in order to determine reparation measures required by the case in accordance with a UN instrument and the jurisprudence of international bodies, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It will be very important for other UN bodies and NGOs to strongly support this process because at the beginning it will undoubtedly face resistance by states that have accepted the individual complaint mechanisms. The Committee against Torture and other UN committees will face claims by states regarding the powers of those bodies to award reparations in such a detailed way, claims that might be based on the quasi-judicial nature of the committees. However, the award of reparations should be conceived as implicit within the adjudication powers that treaties confer to the committees regardless of their quasijudicial nature. This means that as long as the committee has powers upon a particular case of human rights violations, it also implicitly has the power to award particular reparation measures. Thus, the Committee [against Torture] has the possibility of addressing reparations in a way far beyond what it has previously adopted in the past. This is in accordance with its mandate for individual complaints and with what the Committee itself has determined in General Comment 3, which it recently adopted. But also another issue that was treated by these negotiations was the building of a victims’ memorial to the victims of the violence of these last years. But what happened basically is that the negotiations stopped at that point and suddenly the federal government publically announced the building of a victims’ memorial. They built it in a place that is by the main military base in Mexico, which for many victims was considered an offense because the military actually is one of the main actors in this tragedy, one of the main responsible for this situation. But the main problem is that this memorial was built without previous consultation with the victims about what kind of memorial they wanted. So, many victims took this as an offense and it was actually counterproductive, had no reparation really at all. And of course this profoundly affected the dialogue between government and victims and so this is something the Committee would like to avoid when issuing reparation measures. The way to avoid it is by listening to victims’ needs, therefore awarding concrete measures based on those needs. The Committee against Torture’s Rules and Procedures18 somewhat already provide a solution for this. Rule 117 says that the Committee may hold closed meetings in order to provide further clarification. Regarding these “further clarifications,” I would like to recall a very interesting article published in SUR Journal a couple of years ago. The article is about the compliance with the Inter-American Court’s rulings and one of the very interesting findings of this article is that the more detailed the reparation measure is, the more the chances that the state will comply with that measure. Like for example if, as the Court has repeatedly stated, it orders the state to conduct a serious investigation to punish the perpetrators. Well, that’s a very open statement; it leaves to the state all the means to comply with this order. And, well, we know that states are not enthusiastic about complying with international bodies’ resolutions. I mean, it has no instructions for the state to comply with these measures. So, it’s very different from telling the state you should conduct an investigation by applying the Istanbul Protocol, this and that, so that’s a better way to follow up the decision. The Need for Improvements to Committee Procedure However, there need to be several changes in the Committee’s procedure for resolving individual complaints in order to deal effectively with reparation measures. The one I think is the most important is the one regarding the victims’ point of view as the basis for awarding reparation measures. These measures cannot be filled without considering the victims’ perspective. Particular measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition are created in accordance with the victims’ needs—something that the Committee cannot address by only measuring the damage caused by the violation in abstract. Each victim suffers the consequences of gross human rights violations such as torture in very different ways. Therefore, the Committee should take into account this objective 21