Although transitional justice is engulfed by many critical challenges in addition to the difficulty in measuring its impact, given the number of other factors in any given country’s experience over time, human rights trials or truth commissions need not have a negative effect on human rights practices. This makes transitional justice viable, especially in this age of state-building and democracy promotion in post-conflict societies. In fact, Sikkink and Walling’s comparison of human rights conditions before and after trials in Latin American countries with two or more trial years showed that eleven of the fourteen countries had better Political Terror Scale (PTS) ratings after trials. Latin American countries that had both a truth commission and human rights trials improved more on their PTS ratings than countries that only had trials. These statistics indicate that transitional justice mechanisms are associated with countries’ improving their human rights practices. Each state that employs transitional justice mechanisms will have to determine which mechanisms to use to best achieve the targeted goals. In order to avoid causing disappointment amongst victims, the state should also ensure that the public is well-informed about the goals and limits of those mechanisms.