In every human rights court procedure, arguments related to history – tacitly or explicitly, willingly or unwittingly – are rehearsed by legal professionals, especially in difficult cases that attempt to bring closure to ‘historical wrongs’. With this in mind, in this article, I interrogate the ways in which historiographical frames underpin human rights narratives, focusing on cases concerning authoritarianism and state violence in the European and Inter-American systems. With this notion, I refer to how courts use existing public materials – as if they were historians encountering a body of scholarly work – and make ‘historiographical’ decisions about the way these documents shed light on the facts or the applicable law in the dispute at hand. In particular, I focus on how the Strasbourg and San José tribunals engage with arguments related to factual context, legal change, and (dis)continuity in relation to their understanding of the history of the respective regions in which they operate – with important consequences for legal reasoning and judicial interpretation. By bringing these two regional systems in conversation, I highlight how a sense of a shared temporal experience is central to their claims to speak on behalf of Europe or the Americas.