On 29 January 2025, Mitchell Institute Deputy Director, Professor Louise Mallinder, delivered her inaugural professorship lecture.  The lecture was entitled ‘Does Customary international Law Prohibit Amnesties?’.

In 2004, the Special Court of Sierra Leone observed that there was a ‘crystallising international norm that a government cannot grant amnesty for serious violations of crimes under international law’.  In this Lecture Louise examined whether, two decades years later, this international norm has indeed crystallised into a binding rule of customary international law.  Louise explored how we can identify if a purported norm is a customary international law rule and presented evidence drawn from Professor Mallinder’s newly updated Amnesties, Conflict and Peace Agreement Database, to document how states have engaged with this norm.  This empirical data demonstrated that there is little evidence that the anti-amnesty norm has attracted sufficiently widespread state support to be viewed as a customary international law norm.  Louise discussed what this enduring gap within the international legal framework means for politicians, peace mediators, and civil society groups seeking to ensure peaceful and stable transitions from mass violence.

This event was jointly hosted by the School of Law and the Mitchell Institute and chaired by Mitchell Institute Director Professor Richard English.

Watch the recording below:

 

Professor Louise Mallinder

Professor Mallinder is the Deputy Director and Theme Lead for Legacy at the Mitchell Institute. Louise is also Professor of Law at the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests relate to the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and law and politics in political transitions.