Amnesty on trial: impunity, accountability, and the norms of international law

Power, Pragmatism and Prisoner Abuse: Amnesty and Accountability in the United States

“…118 This caused inaction, which combined with a tendency among states and international actors to view amnesty laws as matters of state sovereignty. 119 As a result, for the first few decades of its existence, the UNSC did not routinely engage in amnesty debates within conflicted or transitional states. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Security Council became more active in responding to serious human rights violations.…”

Healing Past Violence: Traumatic Assumptions and Therapeutic Interventions in War and Reconciliation

“…However, and notably, his therapeutic order stands alongside and in tension with, the moral framework of punishment, which continues to provide a crucial role in the reordering of postatrocity politics, most notably in the cases of Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and more recently Iraq. As a result, domestic amnesties need strong justifications, such as those found within the therapeutic lexicon, because they are inconsistent with international criminal law and the nascent International Criminal Court (Pensky 2008), the authority of which are entirely reliant upon delivering upon the promise of punishment for perpetrators of the worst crimes. 16 Consequently, theories about war trauma and therapeutic governance are converging, simultaneously, to justify amnesty and to provide the new moral foundations of multiple postconflict orders.…”

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

“…In general, and in the Darfur case, critics argue that threatening sanctions motivates powerful perpetrators to resist a transfer to a more democratic and human rights-respecting regime (Goldsmith and Krasner 2003, Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003Pensky 2008). Sikkink (2011) instead argues, and she provides statistical evidence for her position, that the justice cascade will not harm, and may possibly improve, democracy and human rights records.…”

“…Others challenge such optimism (Goldsmith and Krasner 2003;Snyder andVinjamuri 2003-2004;Pensky 2008). Most recently, Osiel (2014), while expressing sympathy with the idea of international criminal justice, declares that "international criminal law is unlikely to endure as anything more than an intermittent occasion for staging splashy, eye-catching degradation rituals, feel-good spectacles of good will toward men."…”