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Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide
The Uganda’s Constitutional Court made a significant decision in September 2011 that Thomas Kwoyelo, a rebel commander of an organization called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was entitled to an amnesty which was held to connote “a pardon, forgiveness, exemption or discharge from criminal prosecution or any other form of punishment by the state.” Given the Court’s definitional scope of amnesty in relation to forgiveness, does amnesty then share anything with forgiveness? Or, are they mutually exclusive? This article examines the relationship between amnesty and forgiveness in the context of Kwoyelo’s claim to eligibility for the amnesty; it analyses the counterpositional aspects of the amnesty and forgiveness; and, it concludes that amnesty and forgiveness are coterminous in relation to their motivation, justification and outcomes, and that they are both capable of serving as an essentially a pragmatic tool kit to secure a political settlement within a polity divided by violent conflicts. This article intends to contribute to the debate about the relationship between amnesty and forgiveness, as well make recommendations to policy-makers and organizations operating in armed conflict hotspots, on the utility of the two concepts in de-escalating conflict and preventing further atrocities.
Bislang hat sich die Demokratieforschung kaum damit auseinandergesetzt, in welcher Weise sich der Umgang mit unter dem Vorgängerregime
begangenen Menschenrechtsverletzungen auf die Konsolidierungschancen einer jungen Demokratie auswirkt. Der Beitrag vertritt
die These, dass die Suche nach Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit lediglich einzelne Teildimensionen von Demokratie beeinflusst, und
greift die Dimension der Rechtsstaatlichkeit heraus. Neben der theoretischen Diskussion möglicher Effekte von Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung
auf die Herausbildung rechtsstaatlicher Standards und Institutionen werden Probleme der Konzeptspezifikation und Messung von
abhängiger und unabhängiger Variable aufgezeigt. Empirische Analysen liefern deutliche Hinweise auf einen positiven Zusammenhang
zwischen Vergangenheitsbearbeitung und Rechtsstaatlichkeit. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die Herausforderungen weiterführender
Forschung zur Wirkung von Transitional Justice beleuchtet.
Until now, democracy research has hardly looked into how the manner in which the previous regime’s human rights violations
are dealt with affects the ability of young democracies to consolidate. The article supports the assumption that the search
for truth and justice only influences certain democratic partial regimes and focuses on the Rule of Law dimension. While discussing
possible effects of reconciliation work on the evolution of standards and institutions of the Rule of Law in theory, the article
also points out the challenges of specifying and measuring the concepts pertaining to the dependent and independent variables.
Empirical analyses provide clear indications of a positive relationship between reconciliation work and the Rule of Law. The
challenges of further research on the effect of transitional justice are examined in this light.
SchlüsselwörterDemokratisierung–Rechtsstaatlichkeit–Transitional Justice
KeywordsDemocratization–Rule of Law–Transitional justice
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