III. THE CHALLENGES FACED BY REPARATIONS PROGRAMMES Reparations can be conceptualized as a relationship between three terms, namely, victims, beneficiaries and benefits. A reparations programme aims to guarantee that every victim will receive at least some sort of benefit from it, thereby becoming a beneficiary. A. Achieving “completeness” Whatever benefits a reparations programme ends up distributing and for whatever violations, its aim is to ensure that every victim actually receives the benefits, although not necessarily at the same level or of the same kind. If this is achieved, the programme is complete. Completeness refers to the ability of a programme to reach every victim, i.e., turn every victim into a beneficiary. Whether this happens depends, to some extent, on the way in which the categories of violations that give rise to benefits are determined (see below). Because completeness can be approached only if the goal is articulated early on and steps meant to guarantee it are put in place from the very outset of the process—as well as throughout the duration of a reparations programme—its challenges need to be dealt with before others are addressed. The completeness of a programme depends, in part, on the following factors: • Information. There may be little or no accurate information about the victims. There may be a lack of absolutely basic information, such as the numbers of victims to be served by the programme, or of more detailed yet important data, such as the victims’ socioeconomic profile. It is easier to design a reparations programme on the basis of information that at the very least is broken down according to age and gender of the victims and includes their family structure, links of dependence, level of education and income, type of work, as well as violations suffered and a brief account of their consequences. Not even truth commission databases and statement-taking procedures are designed with reparations in mind. But they should and, unless information-gathering processes are appropriately designed from the outset, the guesswork involved in designing and implementing reparations programmes will only increase. • Participation. There are many reasons for incorporating participatory processes in the design and implementation of reparations programmes. First of all, they may make the 15