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On Monday 18 November, the Transitional Justice Observatory of the Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago, Chile, launched its annual Human Rights Report. The first and principal chapter in the report has been authored, for the ninth year in a row, by TJI Professor Cath Collins and her team of local researchers, who include fellow senior academics, human rights lawyers, and experts on memory and reparations.

This year the report, which was concluded in August, anticipated the major social protests that exploded onto Chile´s streets in mid October, by highlighting the unaddressed economic, social and cultural rights aspects Chile´s dictatorship-era gross human rights violations, and their immediate repercussions on unsustainable levels of inequality in the present day.

At the report´s launch in Santiago on Monday, keynote speaker and well known national investigative journalist Monica Gonzalez singled out the chapter for praise, stating that it represented the most complete and convincing account she had yet seen, of the immediate origins of the unrest, which is ongoing.

The chapter carries key recommendations for the Chilean state on how to better adjust its public policy and present human rights practices to its international transitional justice obligations, and in the past has been demonstrably  influential in changing state and civil society thinking and practice on truth, justice and reparations connected to the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-1990.

An executive summary in English will be published soon on the TJI and UDP web repositories.

Professor Collins will be returning to Chile in mid-December to carry out training for the government unit most directly responsible for transitional justice policy and practice, based in part on the report´s findings and recommendations.