In Defense of Amnesty? An Analysis of Transitional Justice and State Practice from 1974-2003.

An extensive literature on transitional justice has emerged in recent years and the application of these mechanisms has become a goal of many human rights NGOs and activists. As a corollary of this, general or blanket amnesty has increasingly become viewed as an inappropriate means of dealing with past violence - particularly with the advancement of international law in the area of human rights. Indeed some scholars have argued that more and more newly democratizing states throughout the world are deciding to hold perpetrators of past abuses accountable for their acts through truth commissions and trials, a trend that has been termed the justice cascade. This paper seeks to empirically assess this claim using the newly constructed University of Wisconsin-Madison's Transitional Justice Data Base that tracks transitional justice mechanisms in more than 175 countries over 30 years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]