Form Of Amnesty Research Articles

Features of the Application of the Amnesty Institution under the Laws of the Russian Empire (1845-1917)

The peculiarities of the application of the amnesty institution under the legislation of the Russian Empire are studied, in particular, the Regulations on Criminal and Correctional Punishments of 1845, 1885, 1903, tsarist manifestos, the Amnesty Act of 1905, etc. Thus, the normative consolidation of concepts and partially the procedures of “pardon” and “condonation” was reflected in the Criminal and Correctional Penal Code of 1845, which were duplicated in the Regulations of 1885 and 1903. The reasons for the abolition of punishment could be the following: incurable illness or death of the accused, reconciliation of the parties, the statute of limitations for the crime and pardon. According to the norms of the Code, pardon of criminals came from the supreme autocratic power and the sovereign’s mercy.
 The cumbersome form of the tsarist manifestos, which were mostly issued in connection with solemn dynastic events, proved ineffective for state and political acts. When revolutionary and national movements in the Empire began to take their first steps, the government had to grant amnesty as proof of its sincerity and readiness for democratic changes. An example of such a step was the issuance of an amnesty act fated from June 25, 1905, which was a significant shift in the direction of modern legal understanding and legal enforcement of this legal institution.
 Also the author identified and analyzed several forms of amnesty, which were found in the legislation of that time: abolition, which abolished the general law for a particular case and extinguished the crime itself; indulgence, when not the crime itself was extinguished, but only the punishment for the committed crime; rehabilitation, according to which a person was released from serving a sentence and restored in rights. Depending on the interests and goals pursued by the state, different types of amnesty took place at different stages. In general, the Russian Empire was aware of its three forms: theocratic, dynastic and political.

AMNESTY FOR COUP PERPETRATORS IN FIJI: CREATING PEACE OR POTENTIAL FOR FUTURE CONFLICT

In many countries that have experienced coups d’etat, the coup executors, particularly senior ranking personnel of the state military, granted themselves some form of amnesty and/or impunity from prosecution. While this is effective in achieving short-term peace, sustainable peace remains elusive. This paper challenges the issues surrounding the question of amnesty within such settings, and considers the significance of this neglect. Additionally, most studies do not address the issue of amnesty and impunity for political crimes as the international focus tends to be mostly on gross violation of human rights. However, conflicts in most small island developing states (SIDS) do not reach the intensity to produce such gross violations of human rights though evidence shows that these conflicts can be equally costly to the country (Chauvet, et al, 2010, p. 976).

The Historical Use of Amnesties, Immunities, and Sentence Reductions in Northern Ireland

Throughout the Northern Ireland transition, discussions of amnesty have been controversial and in some cases have undermined political stability. While no formal amnesty has been adopted in the current peace process, there have been repeated processes to limit the liability of particular groups to criminal investigation or punishment. Furthermore, between Partition and the peace process, amnesties were used on several occasions for a range of purposes. Given the controversy surrounding the term amnesty, this report begins by defining the key measures that have been proposed or employed including amnesties, sentence reductions and use immunities. It then explores their historical use by reviewing measures including the Early Release Scheme, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, the ‘On-the-Runs’ scheme, use immunity offered by public inquiries, and proposals relating to amnesty and immunity made by the Consultative Group on the Past, the Haass-O’Sullivan draft agreement, and the Stormont House Agreement. The report concludes that these experiences illustrate that different forms of amnesty and immunity can encourage stakeholders to engage with peacebuilding and truth recovery programmes. However, these past experiences also provide lessons for the proposed Independent Commission on Information Retrieval. On this basis, the report recommends that any new legislation incorporating immunity provisions should be debated openly from the start, and that guarantees of immunity should be sufficiently robust to ensure that those with knowledge of past crimes can engage with the process without fear of prosecution. This report is produced as part of AHRC-funded project on Amnesties, Prosecutions, and the Public Interest in the Northern Ireland Transition.

The military gates to US citizenship: Latina/o “aliens and non-citizen nationals” and military work

This article examines the formation of a contemporary US federal statute (8 U.S.C. §1440) that allows the granting of citizenship to non-citizens in military active duty, including migrants who did not adhere to terms of their visas, or entered the United States without formal authorization. While the actual language of the statute dates back to 1952, its origins are in the Civil War. It is a de facto form of amnesty but one that is generally excluded in contemporary debates about comprehensive immigration reform, DREAM Act proposals, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. The essay contextualizes the statute within the long-standing and widespread forms of amnesty deployed in the United States, and explores the political process of inclusion through exclusion.

The Healing Touch of a Sacred King? Convicts Surrounding a Prince inadventusCeremonies in the Holy Roman Empire during the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries

The author seeks the origins of a specific political ceremony that was quite common not only in medieval but also in early modern Germanic Lander. When solemnly entering a city, the riding prince used to be surrounded by criminals, previously convicted by local courts and sentenced to exile. He brought these convicts with him back into the city from which they had been expelled. This form of amnesty used to be explained by many German scholars mostly in terms of the ‘sacred kingship’ (Sakralkonigtum) as deriving from the charisma of ancient Germanic chieftains or late Roman emperors. They appealed also to the Sachsenspiegel and Schwabespiegel, as if these law books could reveal the basic juridical norms that made it possible for the princes to grant their pardon to exiled criminals. The article argues that the custom had 61 See W. Bauer, ‘The “Colt” of Palm Sunday (Der Palmesel)’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 72 (1953), pp. 220–9; V.K. Ostoia, ‘A Palmesel at the Cloisters’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, N. S., 14 (1956), pp. 170–3; J.A. von Adelmann, ‘Christus auf dem Palmesel’, Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde, 63 (1967), pp. 182–200; E. Lipsmeyer, ‘Jahreslaufbrauchtum: Palmsonntag-Christus und Palmesel’, Volkskunst, 1 (1989), pp. 50–8; U. Liebl, ‘Palmesel’, Lexikon des Mittelalters, 6 (Munich, 1999), col. 1645. There is also rich literature about regional variations of the Palmesel customs. 62 G. Waitz (ed.), ‘Gerhardi Vita Sancti Oudalrici Episcopi’, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vol. 4 (Hannover, 1841), p. 391. 63 J.B. Haggenmuller, Geschichte der Stadt und der gefursteten Grafschaft Kempten von den altesten Zeiten bis zu ihrer Vereinigung mit dem baierischen Staat, vol. 1 (Kempten, 1840), p. 221. The Healing Touch of a Sacred King 193 nothing in common either with Roman emperors, ancient chieftains and ‘sacred kingship’, or with the ‘Mirrors’—both these habitual explanations are in fact nothing more than historiographical myths. The author claims that this highly impressive element of royal and princely representation did not even emerge in Germany but was borrowed there only in the late middle ages from an alien royal tradition, and for its roots one should in fact look not to kings but rather to bishops.

(Re-)Writing History of the Second World War: Forgetting and Remembering the Taiwanese-Native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan

This article studies the history and historiography of Taiwanese World War II veterans (commonly known as Taiji Riben bing or Taiwanese-native Japanese soldiers), who served as Japanese paramilitary fighting the Chinese and Allied forces. Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese were recruited into the Japanese forces during the war, serving in Taiwan, mainland China, the Pacific islands, and across Southeast Asia. After the war, however, the experiences of the Taiwanese and Chinese fighting each other were largely repressed and ignored in official and scholarly accounts of the war. Consequently, the Taiwanese veterans were absent in postwar discourse of veterans and public memory of the war. This politically imposed amnesia in the public memory served as a form of amnesty for the Taiwanese veterans, allowing the Kuomintang (KMT) government to redeem these former enemies and re-represent them as a force in its anticommunist campaign since 1949. Overall, forgetting the history of Taiwanese-native Japanese soldiers helped to create and maintain national and social unity in postwar Taiwan under the KMT rule. As a result of this amnesia, Taiwanese veterans have been rather insignificant, if not completely absent, in the postwar discussion of war-related issues such as jus post bellum (war crimes, compensation to the civilians and veterans) and commemoration of the war until 1990. In the 1990s, with the publication of oral history projects and autobiographical works, the history of the Taiwanese veterans gradually emerged out of the private domain and began to draw more attention in the public discourse of the Second World War. This article will argue that the emergence of a new discourse of Taiwanese veterans since the 1990s has served as a (long overdue) redemption for the Taiwanese veterans and the beginning of recovering (and reconstructing) the long-neglected general wartime history of Taiwan. At the same time, however, this new discourse of Taiwanese veterans (and recovered memory of the war) challenges the national and social unity created by political amnesia in postwar Taiwan. Issues related to the historiography of the Taiwanese veterans such as the recent controversy over Lee Tang-hui's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine continue to stir debate over the legacy of the Second World War in Taiwan and to generate conflict over the already divisive national identity in Taiwan.

Von der „Säuberung“ zum Generalpardon: Die Entnazifizierung der westdeutschen Wirtschaft

Abstract Immediately following World War II, the allied occupational powers started a process of denazifying West German business in more or less the same way as the political and administrative apparatus. Initial approaches to solve the task by a radical purge of highly incriminated company managers soon gave way to more extensive investigations of party members and Nazi sympathizers also on lower ranks. Denazification escalated into bureaucratic mass procedures and finally ended up in various forms of amnesty and pardon in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A key feature in this process was the successively growing participation of German actors like various commissions, chambers of commerce and the companies themselves. On the one hand, comprehensive investigation and punishment under a re-installed rule of law had to rely upon cooperation of German actors and their expertise on the reality of the Nazi past; on the other hand, the integration of business itself into denazification procedures allowed company managers to benefit from informational advantages. Focussing the interaction between denazification authorities and business in the three West German zones of occupation, the article argues that under the general conditions of economic reconstruction and democratization the degeneration from purge to pardon was hardly avoidable, but that nevertheless the effects of temporary punishments should not be underestimated.

Beyond the Courts? The Complex Relationship of Trials and Amnesties

Since its inception, the central dilemmas of transitional justice have often been framed in stark dichotomies, encapsulated most notably in the phrase: ‘peace versus justice’. This phrase has been widely used to describe the extent to which elites in states undergoing transitions from mass violence may face political, military, and economic pressures to compromise justice in order to obtain peace. Where amnesty laws have been enacted as part of negotiated peace deals they are often perceived as embodying such compromises as they can serve to shield the signatories of peace agreements and their supporters from criminal prosecutions. Although in a small number of cases, such amnesty or immunity agreements may be granted provisionally, more commonly, they are intended to create a permanent barrier to the pursuit of trials for past crimes, where such trials would arguably risk destabilising the fragile political transition. As a result, amnesty laws to shield offenders from criminal sanctions are commonly viewed as the antithesis of trials. At first blush, this perception of amnesty laws as a once-only political pact to close the door on the past is understandable. However, as this paper will argue, closer inspection reveals that transitional states rarely face a binary choice between amnesty and justice, but rather may undergo a continual process of re-negotiation of the balance between impunity and accountability as the transition evolves. Indeed, during political transitions countries rarely follow a linear path towards justice. Instead, the salience of calls for amnesty or trials often wax and wane depending on the changing political circumstances and the relevance of practical concerns such as the passage of time, the degradation of evidence and the mortality of victims, witnesses and perpetrators. This paper will explore some of these relationships by focusing on how trials and amnesties have been sequenced within transitional states. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted by the author in Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Uganda, South Africa and Uruguay, together with the experiences of amnesties in Cambodia, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste, the paper will detail how trials have been launched in the shadow of pre-existing amnesties, and conversely, how demands for amnesty may continue or reignite following prosecutions by national or international courts. In this way, the paper seeks to highlight that neither trials nor amnesty laws definitively close the door on the past and instead many societies continue to revisit and adapt their processes in response to changing political contexts. In some contexts, this may result in highly complex sequencing arrangements. By exploring these complexities, this paper will highlight two key findings: firstly, that even where trials are pursued, demands for amnesty or immunity may continue to be made. Although in some cases, these demands may seek to undermine transitional justice agendas, in other instances, they could seek to respond to the problems faced by over-burdened criminal justice institutions by incentivising offender testimony or encouraging offender participation in alternative accountability mechanisms. The second finding is that the more egregious forms of amnesty that offer unconditional impunity for serious human rights violations may not be fully sustainable in the longer-term, and may instead face judicial challenges to narrow their scope or invalidate them entirely. The implications of these two findings point towards the development of more nuanced approaches to amnesty laws that incorporate elements of accountability and may even coexist with some form of criminal prosecutions. The final section of this paper will explore how such coexistence can be written into the text of the amnesty laws.

Prosecuting war crimes: Trials and tribulations

During the course of the last decade or so, we have witnessed a growth in the business of international criminal justice, prompted by changes in the international system and a greater concern about violations of human rights occurring within the borders of a state. The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993 was the first step on a path that led to the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court with the adoption of a statute in July 1998 and its coming into force four years later. Prosecuting war crimes was seen increasingly as an important element of the package of measures designed to bring about ‘post-conflict reconstruction’. There was a marked increase also in the number of cases on the basis of the exercise of universal jurisdiction by certain states. More recently, however, a degree of fatigue with international criminal justice was discernable. It was suggested that alternative mechanisms involving greater local involvement and different approaches such as truth commissions or some form of amnesty might be better suited to the lofty demands of post-conflict justice. The books discussed here all make a significant contribution to the growing body of literature examining ways of dealing with the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and the complex legal, political, ethical and practical issues involved.