There is little value in affirming the existence of the right to victims of armed conflict to reparation if it is not clear how massive numbers of victims could access to reparation. The chapter shows how accessibility is essential for guaranteeing this right, offering concrete proposals. As human rights law is an important tool for determining the existence of this right, experiences implementing massive forms of reparation for victims of human rights violations also serve to determine its operationalization. This requires adapting basic notions about the right to reparation designed for addressing individual claims to situations where individualized methods for determining rights will result on the exclusion of the vast majority of victims. The chapter examines the experiences of the UN Compensation Commission and the Ethiopia-Eritrea Compensation Commission, as well as of reparations programs implemented in Guatemala, Peru, Sierra Leone, Colombia, and Chile. It analyses how these policies determined the violations to cover, reparation measures, registering victims, and guaranteeing accessibility of vulnerable victims, women and those frequently excluded. These experiences offer criteria for interpreting notions of proportionality, restitutio in integrum, compensation, and standards of evidence, as well as the relationship with judicial reparation, reconstruction, and development in post conflict situations.

Under current international law, victims of armed conflict have a right to reparation from the responsible parties. Political obstacles may, however, prevent victims from bringing reparation claims before domestic courts. For example, if the victims assert reparation claims before the court of a responsible party, they may reasonably fear discrimination if they were targeted in the armed conflict on ethnic, racial or religious grounds. They may also face real and significant legal and procedural obstacles at the domestic level, in the form of jurisdictional uncertainties, immunities, statutes of limitations, lack of sufficient evidence, or the absence of class or group actions. Giving effect to the right to reparation may in such cases only be practicable in an ad hoc mechanism of some sort. In fact, various precedents for such reparation mechanisms exist. Although reparation mechanisms may take many different forms, most need to address such common issues as who is eligible for reparation; what type of harm will be addressed; and what type of remedies are to be made available. The present chapter examines the common and basic principles which can be extracted by the comparative analysis of past and ongoing fifteen mechanisms.