SOAS Law Journal V. 6

About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

table,div,span,font,p{display:none}Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

6 SOAS L.J. 17 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/soas6 and id is 1 raw text is:

Beyond the Failure of Justice: Lebanon's

General Amnesty Law of 1991 and Access to

Redress for Victims of the 1975-1990 Civil War

Sandra Geahchan

This article examines the elements of the general
amnesty law of 1991 promulgated in Lebanon a
year after the end of the civil war that extended
from 1975 to 1990. Through analysis of the
provisions and the language, it finds that the law
was drafted exclusively for the benefit of the new
political elite, former war belligeren ts, in tegrated
into the political sphere through the negotiation
of the Ta'if agreement at the end of the war. The
paper investigates the legal avenues for
overturning the amnesty law in a comparative
analysis with Latin American countries in an
effort to promote accountability. After finding
that legal accountability is unlikely to be reached,
the paper looks at the legacy of the amnesty law in
terms of truth and reparations for victims of the
war. It finds that in some contexts, recognition of
a crime has more weight that retribution, to
ensure a legacy of remembrance.