WHAT ARE TRUTH COMMISSIONS?

Truth Commissions are designed to expose the truth when powerful forces would rather keep it hidden.  They allow masses of poor people who are normally ignored, silenced, and made invisible to speak out and be seen and heard.  There are more Truth Commissions than you might think.  Perhaps the best known is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in the mid-1990s to reveal the true agonies of Apartheid.  At least 17 countries have used them to help different groups coexist after years of conflict.  Today, they are seen as integral to the peace and healing process of most international conflicts.

In the United States, truth commissions have been held in cities across the country in the last few years to highlight the horrors that poverty causes for millions of U.S. residents every day.  The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), Healthcare NOW, the Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP), and many other US based organizations have embraced the mechanism of the truth commission in their struggles to attain social and economic justice for all.  WEAP uses this format with its international origins in order to show how poverty violates internationally sanctioned human rights standards.  When used in this way, truth commissions demonstrate the growing gap between wealth and poverty in America and the urgent necessity to take action now to address this injustice.

Truth commissions have also acted like a trial, indicting the government for the human rights abuses it continues to permit, while also appealing to the offices of local, state, and national policymakers to join in seeking affirmative solutions. Thus, many of the hearings have included the representation of a local congressperson in a grassroots effort to have the plight of poor people addressed in their very own backyards rather than in Washington D.C. Oakland participated in this broad movement for truth when the Women's Economic Agenda Project (WEAP), along with congresswoman Barbara Lee, hosted our first Truth Commission on the Health Care Crisis in 2006 and again recently in 2008.

CA PPEHRC tent at the 2007 US Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia.
Credit: Heather McLaughlin

RAISING AWARENESS, FASHIONING SOLUTIONS

The statements found on the side bar to the right are just a sampling of the testimony that has been generated across the country at truth commissions focused on the health care crisis. Each individual’s story has exposed health care violations while adding insight to the movement for a single payer and Universal coverage health care system.