An official report into France's bloody colonial past in Algeria has recommended that a "memory and truth commission" be set up.
Here are some of the key precedents around the world:
- South African model -
South Africa created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1996, two years after the end of the apartheid regime.
It was a revolutionary concept, devised to steer a country on the brink of chaos away from civil war.
Between 1996 and 1998, some of the darkest days of apartheid repression were re-lived in a kind of public theatre at hearings held by Archbishop Desmond Tutu around the country.
It heard harrowing accounts from about 21,000 victims and perpetrators of abuse between 1960 and 1994.
Of the 7,000 amnesty applications received, the TRC granted about 850. More than 300 cases were recommended for prosecution.
- Liberia -
A truth and reconciliation commission was set up in 2006 to probe crimes committed during one of the bloodiest civil wars in African history, that raged for 14 years until 2003.
Its recommendations, published in 2009, have remained largely unimplemented in the name of keeping the peace because warlords who were incriminated are still considered heroes in their communities.
- Peru -
Peru's independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that a brutal guerrilla war launched by the Maoist Shining Path resulted in the deaths of some 70,000 people in the 1980s and 1990s.
The commission held the Shining Path responsible for more than half of the killings, with the leftist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guilty for about one percent.
It has also said there are more than 4,000 mass graves across Peru.
Its head Salomon Lerner Febres admitted that most of its recommendations have not been followed.
- Brazil -
Brazil's National Truth Commission found that at least 434 people were killed or disappeared by the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
That comes on top of the hundreds of arbitrary detentions and cases of torture of opponents.
- North Africa -
In Morocco King Mohammed VI set up an Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2004 to put an end to abuses by the security forces under his father Hassan II between 1960 and 1999.
Some 18,500 victims of the repression have been compensated, but no alleged torturer has ever been pursued.
In Tunisia a Truth and Dignity Commission was set up in 2014 in a bid to turn the page on the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fell in 2011.
By 2018 it had heard testimony from nearly 50,000 alleged victims and passed 173 cases to the judicial authorities.