teams dedicated both to providing special services and to liaising with regular medical service providers on behalf of victims is one way in which this problem can be mitigated. Experimenting with various insurance schemes may broaden options for victims as well. However, as long as the required expertise is not available, patients cannot get the necessary services, even if there is insurance-provided funding. The inclusion of health services in a reparations programme has much to recommend it. However, it is critical to be aware of the challenges, for there are reasons to think that failing to deliver in this area once expectations have been raised is particularly pernicious to victims. This of course is not a reason not to provide health-care benefits, but rather a reason to strengthen the commitment to planning and budgeting adequately for it. • Other forms of rehabilitation. Several reparations programmes have established specific measures to rehabilitate not just the health of victims but what may be called their “civic status.” These include measures to restore the good name of victims by making public declarations of their innocence, expunging criminal records, and restoring passports, voting cards and other documents. Their importance goes well beyond reasons of expedience; they should be part and parcel of any programme that seeks to provide recognition of victims as rights holders. In addition, learning from the traumatic experience of widows of the disappeared, particularly in Argentina, who clearly needed to resolve custody, matrimonial and succession issues, but were reluctant to ask for a death certificate for their disappeared spouses, programmes of this sort have started issuing certificates of “absence by forced disappearance.” These allow surviving spouses, for example, to recover or sell property, remarry or solve custody disputes, without generating in them the feeling of betrayal they so frequently reported to be part of a request for a death certificate. • Collective reparations. Recently, the notion that reparations benefits can be distributed to “collectivities” has garnered interest and support. Indeed, both the Basic Principles and Guidelines (para. 13) and the Updated Set of principles to combat impunity (principle 32) endorse this idea. The underlying rationale seems to be that when collectivities have been the targets of violence, it makes sense to provide redress to them. Neither document spells out what collective reparations means. The term “collective reparations” is ambiguous. “Collective” is used to qualify, on the one hand, the “reparations,” i.e., the types of goods distributed or the mode of distributing them, and, on the other, the “subject” that receives them, namely, collectivities, including legal subjects. Familiar examples of “collective reparations” in the latter sense abound. A public apology is a collective reparations measure, in the sense that the collectivity made up of all the members of a given group, say a State, a legal entity, receive a particular benefit, in this case an apology. The usefulness of collective measures is apparent in some circumstances. Few would dispute the significance and justifiability of a public apology. The aims of such measures include giving recognition to victims, but also reaffirming the validity of the general norms that were transgressed (and in this way, indirectly, reaffirm- 25