Bargaining for the disappeared? Rewarding perpetrators in transitional justice contexts.

The argument of this paper is that in societies engulfed in extreme violence - where the state is unable to grapple with the phenomenon of missing persons for lack of operational and investigative abilities - authorities should embrace the possibility of seeking collaboration from perpetrators in order to secure information regarding the whereabouts of the victims. In such a context, and especially with the state "captured" in this way, punishment of a few perpetrators alone is unlikely to abate crime unless such punishment is extensive (i.e., broad), reaching all perpetrators. THE FORENSIC PRINCIPLE AND THE PROPORTIONATE PUNISHMENT PRINCIPLE The proportionate punishment principle maintains that the state must punish all those who commit a crime and that said punishment must be proportional[12] to the crime in question. Disappearances as I understand them in the paper refer to those involving some form of state complicity, which international law designates as I enforced i disappearances, as well as to disappearances perpetrated solely by nonstate actors, for example insurgent groups or organized crime, without any kind of state complicity. [Extracted from the article]