The Ugandan case is yet another example of the dilemma at the heart of the international community’s ambivalence towards amnesties for serious crimes over many years. It may be that no strict legal rules can be formulated to encompass the myriad and complex factors that must be considered in evaluating the propriety of an amnesty in a particular case. Perhaps the best that can be done is to apply a series of guiding principles, such as those outlined earlier, which may assist in balancing the competing interests and in reaching a legitimate result that serves the ends of both justice and security as far as is possible in the circumstances.

These principles include: the existence of a sufficiently important end that amnesties are designed to realise; an individualised amnesty process (where possible); a democratic, participatory or consultative process for determining transitional justice mechanisms; the availability of alternative justice or accountability mechanisms, to prevent impunity and lack of redress for victims; the exclusion of self-interested amnesties; international or multinational participation in amnesty decision-making (where appropriate); and the preservation of a prosecution option for the most serious international crimes (where possible).

Amnesties are sometimes necessary to extricate a society from protracted conflict and to facilitate the immediate transition to peace and the establishment or restoration of democracy. While amnesties may offer immediate gains, the way they are framed and structured has a critical effect on whether immediate gains translate into enduring ones. The wrong kind of amnesties counterproductively destabilise peace and democracy in the longer term, as communal relief at the cessation of hostilities or terrorist violence simmers over, with the lapse of time, into dissatisfaction about impunity and the absence of genuine justice for victims. Even the best practice example of amnesty processes, South Africa, remains controversial. On the one hand, the South African Amnesty Committee concluded that

On the other hand, critics observed that the process failed to secure the convictions of high-ranking perpetrators; most amnesty applicants only revealed what was already known to investigators; and senior leaders did not disclose their involvement in structural violence because amnesties were only available for specific acts, rather than structural participation in organisations.^[80]

Some of these defects could be cured by reforming the structure of amnesty processes, and certainly careful attention must be given to formulating the procedures and powers of amnesty and truth commissions.^[81] Local agency in the design of processes that are appropriate to cultural and resource conditions is vital,^[82] though not necessarily an exclusive determinant of legitimacy. Ultimately, amnesties should be understood as an outcome of a reconciliation process, rather than merely the vehicle for it — and they cannot be isolated from deeper institutional and structural reforms designed to redress and prevent violence.^[83] Of necessity, this includes efforts to address the underlying causes that precipitate at least some terrorist violence.