Vizualizing Apologies for Human Rights Violations

Political apologies are difficult in the best of circumstances, but when it comes to human rights abuses, they are even more rare.

The ERC Consolidator Research Project put together a database of the 376 apologies that do exist from leaders around the world. The apologies are broad, including everything from gestures — in 1997, Queen Elizabeth paid a 30-second moment of silence at the site of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in Punjab, India — to outright requests for forgiveness. No matter how light, each apology included in the dataset arrived there through some recognition violations against fellow human beings.

While apologies in this dataset begin in 1947, they acknowledge crimes committed as early as 1492, including a 2009 resolution from the U.S. recognizing its violence against Indigenous peoples, apologizing explicitly for their forced removal, massacres committed against them, forced assimilation, theft of land and more.

Apologies have increased over the years, peaking in 2018 among political figures. To date, five countries stand above the rest with more recognitions of human rights violations than any others: Japan, Germany, the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Ireland, and Canada.

While apologies are one step toward healing the abuses that color world history, this database begs the question: Just how much is still left unsaid?

All of Japan’s war-related apologies were in regard to World War II, including acknowledgement from 23 of the country’s leaders over a 63-year period from 1957 to 2020.

Japan has also apologized at least 13 times for colonial rule over Korea, including a 2010 apology from then-Prime MInister Naoto Kan to the people of Korea, marking the 100th anniversary of Japan’s annexation of the Korean Empire.

Of Germany’s 21 war-related apologies, 18 were related to WWII and three to WWI. All of the country’s WWI apologies took place after 2005.

In 2021, Germany recognized it had committed genocide in Namibia. All five of Germany’s apologies for “colonial rule” are directed to Namibia. Colonizers killed tens of thousands Herero and Nama people during their occupation from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, according to the BBC.

Along with its latest apology, Germany announced it would pay $1.34 billion in financial aid to Namibia over 30 years — an amount activists say is not enough, per the BBC.

The United States’ war-related apologies are more diverse, including WWII, the Iraq War, the Mexican-American War and Korean War. Nearly all of the United States’ apologies related to WWII are related to the internment of Japanese-Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor; there are no apologies for the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The “other” category above refers to country’s four apologies for medical experiments on human subjects, including for the Tuskegee Experiments.