ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the legal validity of amnesties, pardons, immunities and statutes of limitations used to shield unconstitutional usurpers of power and their accomplices or collaborators from prosecution. Judges of domestic courts have to consider whether they are required by domestic law and/or applicable rules of international law to uphold the aforesaid. The judges themselves may also benefit from such restrictions on the prosecution of acts of the usurper’s regime in which they are co-perpetrators or accomplices. The chapter then analyzes the role of transitional justice after the country’s return to democracy that may have some impact on judicial responsibility arising from repression post-coups. The chapter seeks to strike a delicate balance between not prosecuting perpetrators of abuses under the previous regime for the sake of national reconciliation and/or so as to protect the still weak democratic regime from another coup, on the one hand, and full-scale accountability of past wrongs, on the other hand.
