Verdad moral-histórica y derecho a la verdad: fundamentos epistemológicos y tensiones en el derecho

Abstract

The article examines the human right to truth on a moral-critical foundation and in its concretization as historical and institutional truth, analyzing state obligations and operational tensions in contemporary law. Its aim is to demonstrate—on the basis of normative and jurisprudential milestones in Public International Law—that the right to truth functions as an autonomous entitlement, with both individual and collective dimensions, which imposes duties on States to produce legal truth through specific institutional mechanisms. The methodological design is qualitative, documentary, and critical-argumentative, with a hermeneutic-analytical approach; it integrates a philosophical-epistemological review, a historical-legal reconstruction, and a comparative jurisprudential analysis. A periodization is proposed (theocratic, epistemological, procedural, and human-rights) that traces the shift from absolute conceptions of truth to the recognition of the right to truth within International Human Rights Law. The text shows that moral-historical truth, as a human right, requires the State to undertake effective investigation, preserve memory, open archives, and ensure victims’ participation—thereby generating, as an institutional product, legal truth. It concludes that the tension between substantive (material) truth as a regulative ideal and procedural truth as an operational limit calls for flexible institutional designs; conceptualizing the right to truth as an autonomous human right strengthens the architecture of justice and grounds concrete state obligations of investigation, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition.