Trial Justice by Allen Tim

Author:Allen, Tim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The ICC is spoiling the peace process

Several activists and analysts have vehemently expressed the argument that the ICC intervention will spoil the peace process. This, of course, assumes that a genuine peace process, or a range of peace processes, is under way, and could result in a permanent solution. There are three aspects to the argument, relating to the amnesty, to the ceasefire and to local conceptions of justice. The first two have already been discussed in some detail in Chapter 4 and will be taken together here. The third requires more explanation and is addressed in Chapter 6.

It is obvious that the ICC intervention cannot be reconciled with the existing Amnesty Act, which offers a blanket amnesty to all rebels. The court was set up ‘to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators’ of ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole’ and, as a result, it has an institutional antipathy to amnesties.18 Under the ICC, it is no defence to claim that an accused person is covered by any kind of statute of limitations or other national laws preventing prosecution (such as presidential or parliamentary impunity). The position of the Office of the Prosecutor is that domestic amnesties are strictly a matter for the national authorities and do not prevent the exercise of the ICC’s jurisdiction. In practice this means that Uganda cannot maintain a blanket amnesty if it is to adhere to the Rome Statute, which it is obliged to do. The act will need either to be formally amended or allowed to lapse. The former has not yet happened. The latter is looking ever more likely, although it may be replaced with something more reconcilable with the ICC’s mandate and also more acceptable to President Museveni – who has always been sceptical about the usefulness of a blanket amnesty. There are models that might be drawn upon to allow a partial amnesty to coexist in law with the issuing of warrants for those alleged to bear the greatest responsibility for crimes. Such a procedure could be difficult to implement, however. Several LRA commanders were themselves abducted, some of them when they were children. It will be hard to draw a precise line between those most responsible and those marginally less so, and impossible to avoid complaints about victimization.

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