Tegucigalpa. The Commissioners of the Commission of Truth (Comisión de Verdad – CDV – in Spanish) have arrived in Honduras to accompany the information collecting work of in-country staff, hold bilateral meetingsinternational institutions, and meet with the Supreme Court of Honduras in order to better understand their versions of events in Honduras since the Coup d’État on June 28, 2009.
Costa Rican jurist Francisco Aguilar; founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, Nora Cortiñas; former President of the Truth Commission in Ecuador and current President of the CDV in Honduras, Elsie Monge; Salvadoran Supreme Court judge Mirna Antonieta Perla; and Canadian professor and jurist Craig Scott all arrived in the country yesterday.
Today Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel will join the rest of the team of Commissioners, who also include Hondurans Father Fausto Milla, human rights defender, and writer Helen Umaña. The only member of the team who is absent from this visit is Spanish jurist and human rights expert Luis Carlos Nieto, who is not able to travel due to previous professional commitments.
The Commissioners’ agenda began with a welcome dinner organized by Executive Secretary Thomas Loudon and the rest of the in-country technical team.
Today representatives of the G-16, diplomatic corps from embassies, consulates, and business and development representatives of embassies in Honduras, as well as national and international press, have been invited to a welcome cocktail at 6:00pm in Tegucigalpa.
The event will take place at the El Libertador hotel in the Honduran capital in order to provide an opportunity for invited guests to meet the Commissioners and to share more details regarding their important visit, which is the last prior to the presentation of their preliminary report on June 28th, 2011, the one year anniversary of the inauguration of the Commission.
Agenda
The Commissioners are participating in two important meetings on Wednesday. In the morning they are scheduled to meet with the full membership of the Supreme Court of Honduras to gather their impressions of events in the country leading up to and following the Coup d’État on June 28th, 2009.
In the afternoon they will meet with representatives of the G-16 to inform them of the advances in the investigative work of the Commission, to register with them of the numerous security incidents reported by the CDV, and to share the current circumstances under which they are carrying out their work.
Thursday the Commissioners will be traveling to peninsula of Zacate Grande, on the southern coast of Honduras, to accompany the testimony-collection process of one of the Commissions mobile teams which is currently in the department of Choluteca and preparing to move further south to the peninsula, which has found itself in critical condition with respect to violence which has been exacerbated since the Coup d’État.
The Commissioners will close their public visit on Friday, April 7th with a press conference at 10:00am in the El Libertador Hotel where they will comment on advances in their work during.
The Commissioners are working to establish the format and content of the Commission’s Final Report which will be issued by the end of October, 2011.
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Comisión de Verdad
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Tel (504) 2263-4943
comunicacion@comisiondeverdadhonduras.org
http://www.comisiondeverdadhonduras.org
http://twitter.com/comisionverdad