Var 22. juli-kommisjonen en sannhetskommisjon?

The chapter is an analysis and discussion of the governmental inquiry commission from 2012 that investigated the terror attacks in Norway 22 July 2011. It is argued, first, that the commission was a seemingly ordinary commission. In terms of its composition, the commission process, and the various features of the submitted commission report, the commission had many of the characteristics of a standard Nordic-style public investigation. However, literature on transitional justice has argued that such investigations in the aftermath of extreme terror attacks should preferably be organized along the lines of so-called truth commissions. Based on criteria derived from this literature, the chapter goes on to assess the extent to which the 22 July inquiry had the features of a truth commission. It is concluded that the inquiry, despite its appearance of being “nothing special” qualifies as a rudimentary, but not a full-fledged, truth commission. Finally, the chapter discusses whether the 22 July investigations could and should have taken on more truth commission traits at the time, and the extent to which we need another truth commission now, many years after the 2011 attacks, to properly reconciliate after what remains a national trauma in Norway.