Human rights narratives and the right to truth

Abstract

Human rights stories are claims, told through narrative, to one or more people about something that happened that infringed or violated an agreed-upon human right. Stories can address human rights violations judicially through formal courts, commissions, or tribunals and non-judicially through public narratives in social and political discourses. Human rights stories, told as testimony in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2007–2015) and the #MeToo movement, demonstrate how stories about lived experiences promote human dignity and assert agency. The purpose of this analysis is to highlight the role of storytelling in both the address and redress of human rights violations within the process of telling narratives of lived experience. When states do not initiate or act through judicial processes, or those processes do not un-silence stories of violations, the emergence of informal truth-telling through public narratives emerges (Ganz, 2009). Whether told in formal judicial or informal nonjudicial spaces, sharing lived experiences is an agency asserting action that can respond to systems of oppression. Everyone ought to have a right to tell their story.