Amnesty played a leading role in bringing down the curtain on South Africa’s apartheid regime. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 1995, famously traded truth for justice by granting amnesty from prosecution for those willing to testify fully. For the commission’s chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, amnesty was an essential component of the reconciliation process because of the promise it held for securing the truth and for healing the social divisions created by apartheid. Amnesty, in the form of prisoner releases, was also part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the three decades of violence in Northern Ireland known as “the Troubles.”
Less known is that a sweeping political amnesty began Spain’s transition to a full democracy after four decades of authoritarian rule. The Amnesty Law of 1977 covered all political prisoners, including Catalan and Basque nationalists, as well as the members of the Franco regime. This law is seen as the linchpin of Spanish democratization, and rightly so. Aside from putting a symbolic end to the Spanish Civil War, a bloody conflict that ended in 1939, it enabled most of the political compromises found in the 1978 Constitution — including the incorporation of the Spanish monarchy into a democratic framework, the separation of church and state, and the provision that allowed for the partition of Spanish territory into self-governing regions.
To be sure, there was a big downside to the 1977 amnesty. It helped conceal the so-called Spanish Holocaust, the wave of political reprisals undertaken by Gen. Francisco Franco against the defeated Republicans at the end of the civil war, including thousands of executions and the creation of concentration and labor camps where many prisoners died of neglect and malnutrition. Spain eventually addressed this dark history in 2007 with the Historical Memory Law, which offered reparations to the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship. But amnesty for the old regime was upheld. It was necessary, everyone agreed, for putting the past to rest.
It is disheartening that many who will benefit from the Catalan amnesty law have shown no remorse for their actions. Mr. Puigdemont remains unrepentant and his party, Together for Catalonia, or Junts, has not ruled out holding another illegal referendum. But the most important beneficiaries of the new law are not the radical separatists who violated the Spanish Constitution but rather the vast majority of Catalan and Spanish people who want to put the separatist drama behind them. This amnesty is for them, though they may not see it that way now.
For one thing, the amnesty law is likely to bolster political stability in Catalonia. It undercuts the argument among some separatists that Madrid is incapable of clemency and compromise, robbing them of a rallying cry, and is sure to strengthen the moderate wing of the Catalan separatist movement, which has embraced negotiation as the only viable route to securing independence. As support for Catalan independence declines, the amnesty will also allow Spain to show the world, appalled by the violence that accompanied the referendum, that it is moving on.