• Special taxes targeting those who may have benefited from the conflict or the violations, like those that were proposed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (but never adopted). • Recovery of illegal assets. Especially where a State has accepted providing reparations for victims of third parties, nothing should prevent the State from attempting to recover from those parties. Peru devoted a portion of assets recovered from corruption to such ends and so did the Philippines with monies recovered from the Marcos estate. Colombia is attempting to do so with assets held by paramilitaries. However, reparations programmes should not be held hostage to, or made conditional upon, the recovery of such assets if the State bears clear responsibility for the violations. • Debt swaps. It may be possible for Governments to negotiate agreements with international lenders so that the latter cancel a portion of the country’s debt on condition that the same amount is spent on reparations and other support for victims. On a small scale, Peru was able to reach such agreements. The fundamental point is that where reparations are a matter of rights, reparations programmes require stable sources of funding, and nothing guarantees stability in financing more than a dedicated budget line. F. Interpreting reparations benefits. Linking reparations and other justice measures The size of reparations alone does not determine their success. It is useful to examine the fate of some stand-alone reparations efforts, some of which have distributed large sums of money by way of direct material compensation to victims. Experience suggests it is important to draw significant links between the different elements of a comprehensive justice or redress policy. Reparations efforts that are not linked to other justice initiatives tend to be more controversial than their supporters expect.61 Reparations efforts should be designed in such a way as to be closely linked with other transitional justice or redress initiatives, for example, criminal justice, truth-telling and institutional reform. There is conceptual backing for this as well. Programmes that achieve these connections are said to be externally coherent or to have external integrity.62 This requirement is important for both pragmatic and conceptual reasons. Such connections provide an incentive to interpret 61 62 Cf. the experiences in Brazil and in Morocco with the Independent Arbitration Commission, which operated from 1999 to 2001. See also Cano and Ferreira, “The reparations program in Brazil”, in The Handbook…. See Pablo de Greiff, “Addressing the past: reparations for gross human rights abuses”, in Civil War and the Rule of Law: Security, Development, Human Rights, Agnès Hurwits and Reyko Huang, eds. (Boulder, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007). Whereas external coherence or integrity refers to the relationship between reparations efforts and other justice measures, internal coherence or integrity refers to whether the various benefits distributed by a reparations programme cohere and support one another. 33