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Since its inception, the central dilemmas of transitional justice have often been framed in stark dichotomies, encapsulated most notably in the phrase: ‘peace versus justice’. Within this debate, amnesty laws enacted as part of negotiated peace were often intended to create permanent barriers to the pursuit of trials for past crimes. This perception of amnesty laws as a once-only political pact to close the door on the past is understandable. However, as this paper will argue, closer inspection reveals that transitional states rarely face a binary choice between amnesty and justice. Instead, the salience of calls for amnesty or trials often wax and wane depending on the changing political circumstances and the relevance of practical concerns such as the passage of time, the degradation of evidence and the mortality of victims, witnesses and perpetrators. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted by the author in Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Uganda, South Africa and Uruguay, together with the experiences of amnesties in Cambodia, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste, the paper will detail how trials have been launched in the shadow of pre-existing amnesties, and conversely, how demands for amnesty may continue or reignite following prosecutions by national or international courts. In this way, the paper seeks to highlight that neither trials nor amnesty laws definitively close the door on the past and instead many societies continue to revisit and adapt their processes in response to changing political contexts. By exploring these sequencing relationships, this paper will highlight two key findings: firstly, that even where trials are pursued, demands for amnesty or immunity may continue to be made. Although in some cases, these demands may seek to undermine transitional justice agendas, in other instances, they could seek to respond to the problems faced by over-burdened criminal justice institutions by incentivising offender testimony or encouraging offender participation in alternative accountability mechanisms. The second finding is that the more egregious forms of amnesty that offer unconditional impunity for serious human rights violations may not be fully sustainable in the longer-term, and may instead face judicial challenges to narrow their scope or invalidate them entirely. The implications of these two findings point towards the development of more nuanced approaches to amnesty laws that incorporate elements of accountability and may even coexist with some form of criminal prosecutions. The final section of this paper will explore how such coexistence can be written into the text of the amnesty laws.

Peacebuilding, the Rule of Law and the Duty to Prosecute: What Role Remains for Amnesties?