Abstract

I assess a justification for the granting of transitional amnesties conditional, at the minimum, upon full disclosure of wrongdoing by perpetrators. According to this rationale, such amnesties are morally legitimate because they foster restorative justice. I distinguish between two conceptions of restorative justice that I call the punishment-deprioritizing and punishment-prescribing conceptions. I argue that while conditional amnesties granted to perpetrators of minor offences conditional upon full disclosure, verbal apology and reparations could promote restorative justice well enough to justify them in the eyes of adherents of the punishment-deprioritizing conception, conditional amnesties in favour of perpetrators of serious human rights abuses, because they are unlikely ever to be conditional upon perpetrators’ carrying out burdensome reparations, are likely to promote restorative justice on the punishment-deprioritizing conception only to a limited extent and not enough to justify them from the standpoint of adherents to this conception. Conditional amnesties, I contend, cannot ever promote restorative justice on the punishment-prescribing conception because it holds that punishment is indispensable for the achievement of the aims of restorative justice and amnesties exempt perpetrators from criminal punishment.