A person shall be considered a victim regardless of whether the perpetrator of the violation is identified, apprehended, prosecuted, or convicted and regardless of the familial relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. It is foreseeable that this definition will be adopted by national reparations programmes, as they pay increasing attention to international law commitments.32 Even if a uniform and expansive definition of “victim” is adopted, this does not, on its own, settle a fundamental question that all reparations programmes face, namely, how to select the human rights violations that will trigger reparations. For a reparations programme to at least make sure that every victim is a beneficiary, in addition to satisfying the conditions outlined in the preceding section, it would have to extend benefits to the victims of all the violations that may have taken place during the conflict or repression. If it did that, the programme would be comprehensive. No programme has achieved total comprehensiveness. For instance, no massive reparations programme has extended benefits to the victims of very common human rights violations during authoritarianism, such as violation of the freedom of speech, of association or of political participation. There are other categories of violation that have only seldom been redressed through massive programmes, some of them life-threatening, others not, but nevertheless quite serious, such as forced displacement.33 Most programmes have concentrated heavily on familiar civil and political rights, leaving the violations of other rights largely unrepaired: • Argentina.34 There is no single reparations programme in Argentina. Instead, there have been several initiatives, each stemming from a separate piece of legislation and covering a distinct category of victims. The main laws cover disappearance, arbitrary detention and grave injuries and death while in detention. A 2004 law offers redress to categories of victims that had been overlooked by the initial reparations laws, namely, persons who were born while their mothers were illegally detained, minors who remained in detention due to the detention or disappearance of their parents for political reasons or those who remained in military areas. The law also offers redress to the victims of identity substitution, the term used in Argentina to refer to cases of children of disappeared parents who were registered as the legitimate children of other families, in many cases the military or security personnel who stole them from their biological parents. 32 33 34 See already the reports by the truth commissions in South Africa, Peru and Morocco. The reparations programme proposed by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended giving symbolic reparations as well as various services, including education and health for the victims of forced displacement. Turkey has established an ambitious reparations plan that provides benefits to the victims of internal displacement. See Overcoming a legacy of mistrust: towards reconciliation between the State and the displaced (Istanbul, Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2006). See María José Guembe, “Economic reparations for grave human rights violations: the Argentinean experience”, in The Handbook… 19