For the past two decades, the exhaustive discourse concerning a duty to prosecute crimes against humanity primarily discussed the transition to democracy, replacing authoritarian regimes, and the resultant responsibility of the incoming government to hold the previous government accountable for serious atrocities. As this situation described a predominant international issue in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the legal focus was appropriate. This issue is less relevant now with the increase in nascent democracies that have undergone transition and the recent proliferation in the prosecution of former heads of state. Nevertheless, violent conflicts will endure and will continue to be confined predominantly within states. Therefore, it is vital to evaluate one of the challenging questions of the twenty-first century: whether amnesties for non-State actors are still possible for negotiating the end of civil wars and other violent internal threats to States.
In 1999, the Sierra Leone government and the rebel army Revolutionary United Front signed the Lomé Accord peace agreement, offering amnesty to rebel leaders and other combatants for crimes against civilians, in order to halt eight years of civil war that caused thousands of deaths and massive human rights abuses. The agreement was rendered invalid for the following reasons: the rebels breached the agreement through continued violence and atrocities; the agreement provided blanket amnesty; and, most importantly, the atrocities were severe enough to warrant the establishment of an international tribunal, which did not view the agreement as barring prosecution.
More recently, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni repeatedly offered amnesty to Joseph Kony and other leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army to end two decades of violence in Northern Uganda that cost thousands of lives through heinous acts, caused mass chaos, and uprooted millions from their homes. President Museveni previously referred the case of Kony and his fellow commanders for prosecution to the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), which stated that it is under no obligation to honor an amnesty agreement by the Ugandan government. Nonetheless, Museveni announced that he would grant amnesty if they reached a peace agreement where Kony and his followers renounced terrorism. Some Ugandan civil society organizations similarly asked the ICC to withdraw the indictment and allow the popular amnesty proposal to go forward in order to help end the conflict.
While the Lomé Peace Accord did not prevent prosecution in an ad hoc international tribunal, and the commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army are still under indictment by the ICC, the offers of amnesty raise the focal issue of this Article. Can a State create a viable and effective amnesty agreement for potential crimes against humanity to cease internal conflict or induce the end of a civil war? This Article asserts that the recent expansion of the definition of crimes against humanity, the new willingness to assert universal jurisdiction, and the establishment and early indictments of the ICC have rendered any domestic amnesty for crimes against humanity ineffective on the international plane and have thus removed amnesty as a method to achieve peace.
