the reparations benefits in terms of justice, rather than as an exchange of money and services for appeasement or acquiescence, and might contribute to improving the overall perception of the set of measures (despite their inevitable limitations). It is not just that truth-telling, without reparations efforts, can be seen by victims as an empty gesture. The relation holds in the opposite direction as well, since efforts to repair in the absence of truth-telling could be seen by beneficiaries as the State’s attempt to buy victims’ and their families’ silence or acquiescence. The same tight and two-way relationship may be observed between reparations and institutional reform. Democratic reform without reparative efforts to dignify citizens who were victimized will have questionable legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the victims. By the same token, reparations benefits without institutional reforms to diminish the probability of the violence being repeated are futile. Finally, a two-way relationship also links criminal justice and reparations. The condemnation of a few perpetrators, without any effective effort to provide positive redress to victims could easily be seen by them as inconsequential revanchism. On the other hand, reparations without any effort to achieve criminal justice may seem to victims as nothing more than blood money. As noted in the introduction, it is clear that a new understanding about the complementarity of the different obligations of justice has developed.63 Consequently, it is not only important to establish significant links between criminal justice and reparations, but also inadmissible to trade off one measure against another. Offering reparations to victims of human rights violations does not exempt States from their responsibility to punish the perpetrators of such violations. The regime established by the International Criminal Court, for example, represents a step towards entrenching the coherence of justice and reparations. Thus, empirical evidence as well as an argument about the place of reparations vis-à-vis other justice measures highlight the importance of designing these links from the outset, something that the broad notion of legal remedies underlying the Basic Principles and Guidelines encourages. G. Linking reparations programmes to civil litigation One more challenge facing those who design reparations programmes is the link between the programme and civil litigation. At a broad level, it must be acknowledged that the judicial resolution of individual reparations cases has often played a very important role in catalysing the willingness of Governments to establish massive reparations programmes. Cases before the inter-American human rights system, for example, played that role in Argentina, and continue to exert this type of pressure in Peru and Guatemala. Although their typically large awards 63 “Where transitional justice is required, strategies must be holistic, incorporating integrated attention to individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or an appropriately conceived combination thereof.” (S/2004/616, para. 26) 34