Outlawing Amnesty: The Return of Criminal Justice in Transitional Justice Schemes

This Article responds to an apparent gap in the scholarly literature which fails to merge the fields of human rights law and international criminal law�a step that would resolve the current debate as to whether any amnesty in transitional justice settings is lawful. More specifically, even though both fields are a subset of transitional justice in general, the discipline of international criminal law still supports the theory of �qualified amnesties� in transitional justice schemes, while international human rights law now stands for the proposition that no amnesty is lawful in those settings. This Article brings attention to this new development through a discussion of the Barrios Altos case. This Article seeks to reveal how an international human rights decision can dramatically impact state practice, thus also contributing to a pending question in international human rights law as to whether such jurisprudence is effective in increasing human rights protections. The Article concludes by looking at the implications of this new legal development in regard to amnesties in order to encourage future research regarding the role of criminal justice in transitional justice schemes.