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An emerging consensus regards domestic amnesties for international crimes as generally inconsistent with international law. This legal consensus rests on a norm against impunity: the chief role of international criminal law, and of the fledgling International Criminal Court (ICC), is to end impunity for violators of the worst of criminal acts. But the anti-impunity norm, and the anti-amnesty consensus that has arisen from it, now face serious difficulties. The ICC's role in the ongoing conflict in Northern Uganda illustrates the deadlock that has now emerged between countries wishing to retain the power to use domestic politics and criminal law as tools for negotiation with current or outgoing perpetrators, on the one side, and the ICC's determination to apply a consistent international anti-impunity norm, on the other. The paper argues that the anti-impunity norm itself is based on a narrowly retributivist conception of criminal justice. A broader norm for democratic accountability, by contrast, would continue to prefer prosecutions over amnesties in international law, less for the opportunity for deserved retribution for perpetrators than for the public enactment of the deliberative procedures associated with the rule of law. Adapted from the source document.

A comment on Seyla Benhabib's book, The Claims of Culture (2002), which presents a constructivist view of cultures as dynamic, contested, & overlapping, praises her view of cultural politics & agrees that the insights of deliberative democracy are the best model for clarifying the status of multicultural democracies. However, questions are raised about whether Benhabib succeeds in her attempt to reconcile discursive democracy & plural cultural goods. It is contended that her view that all cultures are subject to three midlevel principles in the same way ignores the core problem of the "relation between a largely secular, procedural, & formal majority culture in Western-style democracies, versus the various forms of traditional cultures." Emphasis is placed on the need for democratic theory to address this asymmetrical relation as the main problem of pluralism rather than varied forms of culture-to-culture conflict. It is also maintained that Benhabib's principle concerning the voluntary ascription of cultural membership is not necessarily compatible with a coherent sense of what it means to be a member of a cultural group. J. Lindroth

Book reviewed in this article:Alex Demirović, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule