Truth commissions are an active deliberative process. Outgoing and incoming politicians, government and opposition parties, victim’s groups, civil society, human rights organizations, the judiciary, and the media participate in truth commission processes to achieve multiple objectives. What makes them essentially deliberative is that the commissioners and the staff constantly makes choices when they define such basic objectives as truth, reconciliation, justice and memory and decide how those objectives should be met and whose needs should be served. Inevitably, there will be winners and losers in a truth commission process. Thus, assessing the conditions under which truth commissions are likely to emerge is vitally important in order to understand how truth commissions are capable of influencing policy.