II. THE CONTEXT OF REPARATIONS The very broad understanding of “reparations” that underlies the five categories in the Basic Principles and Guidelines—an understanding that is closely tied to the more general category of “legal remedies”—is perfectly consistent with the recent trend to look for complementarity among justice measures. There are binding obligations to provide these five kinds of measures. However, the five categories go well beyond the mandate of any reparations programme to date: no reparations programme has been thought to be responsible for “distributing” the set of “benefits” grouped under the categories of satisfaction and, especially, of guarantees of non-repetition in the Basic Principles and Guidelines. Indeed, it can be argued that the five categories in the Basic Principles and Guidelines overlap with the sort of holistic transitional justice policy that the Secretary-General recommends in his report on the rule of law and transitional justice.15 In practice, those who are responsible for designing reparations programmes are unlikely to be responsible for designing policies dealing, for example, with truth-telling or institutional reform. They concentrate on the design of programmes that are organized mainly around the distinction between material and symbolic measures and their individual or collective distribution. Rather than understanding “reparations” in terms of the wide range of measures that can provide legal redress for violations, it is as if they understood it more narrowly, in terms of whatever set of measures can be implemented to provide benefits to victims directly. Implicit in this difference is a useful distinction between measures that may have reparative effects, and may be obligatory as well as important (such as the punishment of perpetrators or institutional reforms), but do not distribute a direct benefit to the victims themselves, and those that do, “reparations” strictly speaking. As the following section makes clear, even with the narrower understanding of the tasks involved in designing and implementing a reparations programme, the challenges are significant. A. Background and context Before examining in detail some of the concrete challenges that reparations efforts usually face, it is important to pay attention to some general characteristics of the contexts in which they typically take place and to their possibilities and limitations. 15 See, e.g., S/2004/616, para. 26. 9