Policy objections to amnesties include that they conflict with obligations to prosecute international crimes; thwart victims’ rights to a remedy; and undermine the rule of law.^[26] In some cases, far from promoting peace or reconciliation, amnesties may counter-productively foster perceptions of injustice and accentuate grievances, destabilising efforts to re-establish order or democracy in the aftermath of violence. In part, this is why some amnesties have later been overturned, often many years later (as in Latin America) where short-term gains are gradually overshadowed by the long‑term implications of failing to remedy structural violence across society. On one view, prosecutions can be validly suspended in the short-term to ensure security, as long as there is the prospect of accountability at some point, and as long as the exceptional suspension of justice does not destroy the rule in favour of prosecution.^[27]

In a recent example, in 2006 former Liberian President Charles Taylor was apprehended fleeing Nigeria, where he had earlier been granted asylum in an agreement to end 14 years of vicious civil war in Liberia. While his surrender to the Special Court for Sierra Leone for prosecution (including on terrorism charges) can be viewed as a victory for his victims, a prospective danger of not honouring amnesties is that strongmen may never agree to surrender power. Insistence on criminal justice over all else may carry a price in many more lives lost in the perpetuation of conflict.

Amnesties need not be a capitulation to power politics, but can be, depending on their form and mode of adoption, a necessary, pragmatic and principled concession to the political realities that bound the operation of law. Their importance lies not only in inducing the immediate end of conflict, but in establishing the conditions for a lasting peace. In some situations, promoting (if not necessarily achieving) ‘a forgetting, an oblivion, so that thoughts of revenge or reprisal would not reopen the conflict’^[28] may be preferable to criminal justice.

Indeed, a criminal justice model, with its emphasis on punishment and retribution, is not always the most appropriate way of dealing with international crimes or serious human rights abuses, including for cultural reasons in some circumstances. Alternative forms of truth-telling, such as reconciliation processes combined with amnesties, may contribute more effectively to peace building.^[29] Even where prosecutions are necessary, they may carry other costs which ought to be recognised. The individualisation of guilt may also fail to capture the structural nature of violence across society. While a failure to individualise may create a culture of personal impunity, conversely too much individualisation of guilt can atomise responsibility in a way which fails to explain why violence occurred and how it might best be prevented from reoccurring,

At a pragmatic level, criminal justice systems may simply be unable to cope with systemic, large-scale violence, where individual prosecutions would overwhelm the capacity of regular courts — as in Rwanda, where 100,000 suspected genocidaires languished for many years in pre-trial detention, without realistic prospects of coming to trial, until the gacaca system of village-based justice (adapted from local dispute resolution techniques) was brought into play (which itself raises distinctive questions of procedural fairness). In addition, societies recovering from conflict may have other priorities: reconstruction, development, rehabilitation, administrative and governmental reform and so on, which may have to be balanced against the availability of resources for investment in individual criminal trials.