International truth commissions first developed in the 1970s to provide a critical alternative to domestic criminal justice systems in assessing responsibility for large scale human rights abuses. The punitive theme of traditional criminal justice systems in which they prosecute perpetrators of past injustices focused more specifically on individual atrocities. They neglected the importance of hearing the stories and the different perspectives of all victims. In order to escape such inherent limitations, truth commissions sought to investigate more than just individual responsibilities and were created to focus especially on giving victims a public voice. Through considering their various accounts, commissions attempted to answer the unanswered questions and to link together the entire chain of circumstances and individual atrocities that created such massive human rights violations. Thus, through acknowledging and hearing the suffering of all victims, societies could understand in precise detail what occurred and why. Indeed, truth commissions were designed to go beyond the limitations of law into the possibilities of literature.